2018 Independent Spirit Awards

The 2018 Spirit and Razzie Awards

After four consecutive years of simply mirroring the Oscars’ Best Picture pick, the Independent Spirit Awards actually attempted to follow their mission this year and rewarded a different movie that Oscar passed over. Meanwhile, the Razzies are still a thing that happens for some reason.

Spirit Awards

Jordan Peele and ‘Get Out’ were the big winners at the Spirits, claiming both Best Director and Best Feature. Of course, ‘Get Out’ is hardly some obscure art film. Despite technically being an independent production, the movie was a big blockbuster hit and was nominated for several Oscars (winning Best Original Screenplay there). A few days ago, a lot of people thought it actually had a chance at the Best Picture Oscar too. (It didn’t.) Still, the Sprits did their job and gave it a concession prize.

Also in the Best Feature category were fellow Oscar nominees ‘Lady Bird’ and ‘Call Me by Your Name’. They didn’t win here either, but they did take home Best Screenplay and Best Male Lead respectively.

‘The Florida Project’, which was virtually shunned at the Oscars, was also at least nominated for Best Feature. The final nominee was something called ‘The Rider’, which appears to be a Western. I’m not sure if that ever got a theatrical release.

Notably, James Franco was nominated in the Best Male Lead category for ‘The Disaster Artist’. (He lost to Timothée Chalamet.) I suppose that means that the ballots went out before his scandal broke.

I didn’t watch much of the ceremony, but I saw a bit where hosts Nick Kroll and John Mulaney tore into Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey and other disgraced figures with much more venom than the tepid acknowledgment Jimmy Kimmel was allowed to make at the Oscars.

  • Best Feature: ‘Get Out’
  • Best Director: Jordan Peele, ‘Get Out’
  • Best Male Lead: Timothée Chalamet, ‘Call Me by Your Name’
  • Best Female Lead: Frances McDormand, ‘Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri’
  • Best Supporting Male: Sam Rockwell, ‘Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri’
  • Best Supporting Female: Allison Janney, ‘I, Tonya’
  • Best Screenplay: Greta Gerwig, ‘Lady Bird’
  • Best Cinematography: ‘Call Me by Your Name’
  • Best Editing: ‘I, Tonya’
  • Best Documentary: ‘Faces Places’
  • Best International Film: ‘A Fantastic Woman’
  • Best First Feature: ‘Ingrid Goes West’

Razzie Awards

I hardly even know what to say about the Razzies anymore. The big loser of the evening was ‘The Emoji Movie’… which, you know, sure, whatever. It’s an easy target, as is so frequently the case with these things. I’m surprised anyone even remembered that movie enough to hate it so much.

Tom Cruise was shamed with Worst Actor for ‘The Mummy’. I have no doubt that ‘The Mummy’ is a bad movie (I haven’t bothered to watch it), but was Tom Cruise honestly the thing that was wrong with it? That seems unlikely to me.

  • Worst Picture: ‘The Emoji Movie’
  • Worst Director: Anthony Leondis, ‘The Emoji Movie’
  • Worst Actor: Tom Cruise, ‘The Mummy’
  • Worst Actress: Tyler Perry, ‘Boo! 2: A Madea Halloween’
  • Worst Supporting Actor: Mel Gibson, ‘Daddy’s Home 2’
  • Worst Supporting Actress: Kim Basinger, ‘Fifty Shades Darker’
  • Worst Screenplay: ‘The Emoji Movie’
  • Worst Screen Combo: Any Two Obnoxious Emojis, ‘The Emoji Movie’
  • Worst Remake, Rip-Off or Sequel: ‘Fifty Shades Darker’
  • Special Rotten Tomatoes Award: The Razzie Nominee So Bad You Loved It: ‘Baywatch’

For the complete list of winners for each ceremony, see the official Spirit Awards web site and Razzie Awards web site.

6 comments

  1. I had some very intelligent, well cultured people tell me to watch ‘Baywatch’, and that I’d love it. I happened to grab a digital copy dirt cheap, and it propagated to our shared Ultraviolet library. They all saw it before I did, and they weren’t wrong, it was a funny movie. Not a good movie, but a funny movie!

  2. Timcharger

    “Special Rotten Tomatoes Award: The Razzie Nominee So Bad You Loved It”

    When did this become a thing? Google tells me that it was just awarded this year. That’s a category that would actually mean something unique. It should be an annual award. We all like some movie that we know kinda/mostly sucks.

    • Josh Zyber
      Author

      That Razzies make up their award categories every year depending on what their founder feels like doing or thinks would be funny. This one replaces the “Razzie Redeemer Award” that was given out the last couple years.

  3. DarthGilman

    “After four consecutive years of simply mirroring the Oscars’ Best Picture pick, the Independent Spirit Awards actually attempted to follow their mission this year and rewarded a different movie that Oscar passed over”
    1) Their voting would have been done before they knew who the Oscars winners were
    2) Their mission isn’t to pick something different from the Oscars (for the mere sake of picking something different), but to highlight independent movies. Just because the Oscars happened to have awarded Best Picture to independent movies recently (or are you going to argue Moonlight was a typical studio movie?), doesn’t invalidate or obsolete the Spirit Awards.
    “Despite technically being an independent production”- Nothing “technically” about it. It is by any reasonable definition an independent movie. Just because something makes money doesn’t invalidate that basic fact.

    “The Mummy’ is a bad movie (I haven’t bothered to watch it).. ”
    So you admit you’re talking out of your ass. But, hey, why should this be any different than most of your “get off my lawn”-style rants?

    • Josh Zyber
      Author

      The original intention of the Independent Spirit Awards was to highlight and reward movies that were overlooked by the Oscars and other major awards bodies. Yet in recent years, they have primarily nominated and awarded the same movies that Oscar does. This begs the question of what the point of the Spirits is anymore.

      Many of the movies nominated for Independent Spirit Awards are not independent at all, but were produced by labels like Fox Searchlight, Sony Pictures Classics, or Warner Independent – which, despite one calling itself “Independent” in its name, are merely the specialty low-budget divisions of major studios.

      Even Get Out, which was produced by Blumhouse Productions, was distributed and promoted by Universal Studios, with the full weight of the Universal marketing machine pushing it at both the box office and all the various award shows. There’s very little “independent” about that.

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