Independent Spirit 2006 Award Winners
by Andre Soares
Kimberly French / Focus Films
Brokeback Mountain won two top awards - Best Film and Best Director (Ang Lee) at the Independent Film Spirit (IFS) awards ceremony earlier today. Curiously, the gay ranch-hand melodrama failed to garner a Best Screenplay nod. The winner in that category was Dan Futterman for Capote, the critically acclaimed semi-biopic - it focuses on one section of author Truman Capote’s life - that also won Philip Seymour Hoffman the Best Actor award.
Felicity Huffman was chosen the Best Actress for her delightful pre-op transsexual in Transamerica, while Matt Dillon and Amy Adams took home the acting awards in the supporting categories for, respectively, Crash and Junebug.
Crash, which has been overhyped as a potential upset winner at the Academy Awards ceremony tomorrow (some people have been struggling awful hard to add suspense to this year’s utterly predictable Oscar winners*), won every single Independent Film Spirit award for which it had been nominated. That makes it a total of two wins.
Besides Dillon’s award, Crash also won as Best First Film. The recent hype surely didn’t hurt the film’s chances to win, especially considering that IFS voters hadn’t even deemed Paul Haggis’s simple-minded racial drama worthy of a Best Film, Best Director, or Best Screenplay nod.
Despite calls for boycotts from those who apparently haven’t seen the anti-terrorism film, Hany-Abu Assad’s Paradise Now won the Best Foreign-Language Film Award.
* Addendum: The overhypers were right and I was sadly - I didn’t care for Crash - wrong.
Winners of the Independent Film Spirit 2006 Awards
List of the British Academy of Film 2006 nominees
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