With five nods each, the crowd-pleasing dysfunctional family comedy Little Miss Sunshine (US$59 million at the U.S./Canada box office) and the socio-psychological drama Half Nelson ($2.7 million at the U.S./Canada box office) led the pack of the 2006 nominees for the Independent Spirit Awards. In addition to its five nods, Half Nelson was listed (along with Point&Shoot) as Producer Award nominees Alex Orlovsky and Jamie Patricof's two representative films.
Both Little Miss Sunshine and Half Nelson received nominations for Best Film (or, per the official category title, Best Feature), Director (Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, and Ryan Fleck, respectively) and First Screenplay (Michael Arndt, and Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden, respectively).
Surprisingly, Little Miss Sunshine's much-touted Abigail Breslin failed to show up among the nominees, though veteran Alan Arkin and Paul Dano were both listed in the Best Supporting Actor (or, officially, Supporting Male) category. (Perhaps Breslin was the victim of a lead vs. supporting vote split.)
As expected, Ryan Gosling, the idealistic drug-addicted teacher in Half Nelson, is one of the five actors vying for the "Male Lead" award. But the "Female Lead" nomination for Shareeka Epps, the inner-city girl in the same film, came as a surprise for her role is considerably smaller than Gosling's.
(In one of those bizarre listings so beloved by award-giving groups, Amber Tamblyn, clearly the lead in Stephanie Daley — the actress, in fact, plays the title role — received a "Supporting Female" nod. Either way, Tamblyn is outstanding as the mother who may or may not have killed her newborn.)
Other Best Film nominees are Aric Avelino's look at gun madness, American Gun; Karen Moncrieff's psychological mystery thriller The Dead Girl; and Guillermo del Toro's violent political fantasy El laberinto del fauno / Pan's Labyrinth.
A Spanish-language Mexican-Spanish-American co-production, written and directed by Mexican del Toro, set in Spain, and starring a cast of mostly Spanish performers, Pan's Labyrinth curiously managed to be included as an American film. Del Toro's nightmarish fantasy is Mexico's submission for the 79th Academy Awards.
I hope the two foreign-language films I haven't seen — Auraeus Solito's dramatic comedy Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros / The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros (The Philippines) and Adrián Caetano's political drama Crónica de una fuga / Chronicle of an Escape (Argentina) are (considerably) better than the three I've seen: Rachid Bouchareb's socially conscious war melodrama Indigènes / Days of Glory (France / Morocco / Algeria / Belgium), Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's political melodrama Das Leben der Anderen / The Lives of Others (Germany), and Corneliu Porumboiu's dry political satire A fost sau n-a fost? / 12:08 East of Bucharest. (Missing in Action: Pedro Almodóvar's Volver.)
Das Leben der Anderen has been nominated for Best European Film at the European Film Awards, while A fost sau n-a fost? has been listed in the Best Screenwriter (Porumboiu) category.
Recently deceased filmmaker Robert Altman's name was included among the nominees for the Director award — for his folksy dud A Prairie Home Companion — while Film Independent showed that its members have either a warped sense of humor or a warped sense of reality by placing Michael Winterbottom's and Mat Whitecross' docudrama The Road to Guantanamo in the "Documentary" category.
The 6,000 Film Independent members will pick the winners, who will be be announced on Feb. 24, 2007, the day before the Academy Awards ceremony.
Full list of nominees for the 2006 Independent Spirit Awards