Spirit Awards Grapple With, Defeat 07's Bleakness

It's no knock on the Spirit awards that it was a show--and party--in search of its defining moment until the very end, when host Rainn Wilson and Best Lead Actor winner Phillip Seymour Hoffman closed their three-act woofing drama with a mighty (if gleefully stagy) tussle on the floor of the big white tent.

This is not to undersell the significance of a semi-sweep by the genial JunoThe Diving Bell and the Butterfly snaring best director for Julian Schnabel (and the cinematography award for Janusz Kaminski) and the tough-talking but ultimately sweetly intentioned The Savages earning Tamara Jenkins Best Screenplay and Hoffman best actor, it was a night whose theme--using a word that rings a bell somehow--was a kind of hope. The films that drew big applause in the big tent at the Spirit awards showed how to wring transcendence out of paralysis, to find and a new start out of family troubles, for an astoundingly cute and mouthy teenage girl to see that filial love can have a future even if marital love, as it is for the grown-ups in Juno, is badly damaged.

In the press tent, the line of questioning for the happy Juno crowd seemed to lightly insinuate that the comedy still had something to prove at the Oscars. Diablo Cody picked up her award with a line featuring a choice epithet that seemed perhaps too clever by half on stage, whereas her screenplay is only too clever by something like 3/16ths. No, she wouldn't be calling her potential Mr. Oscar a "mother**cker", she vowed: "I'm gonna go all classy-like for the Oscars, I'm gonna wash under my arms." That, a tarty tattoo and cleavage for miles in her red dress seemed to uphold her indie cred. It was Wilson, perhaps mindful of the high-end, security-laden marketing tents around the big top's perimeter, who congratulated the appropriately "edgy, maverick, cutting edge" key sponsor of the awards, Pop Secret popcorn.

Wilson's row of "auditions" for the best picture-nominated films were amusingly wrought, and only Steve Zahn's spiritedly nasal Dylan impersonation for the ensemble I'm Not There ("Todd Haynes, what's goin' down/Was Gary Coleman out of town?") outpointed Wilson's Dylan take. In fact, the iconic folksinger bestrode the entire event like a comic colossus, and the Robert Altman Award for Haynes's ensembe casting effort was further validated by Cate Blanchett's win for and Best Supporting Female . (She reminded all that she's not just one of our best actresses, but surely the most sporting, as she traipsed about in heels, quite pregnant, and gave a graceful nod to co-star Heath Ledger--whose funeral she'd attended in their home country of Australia--by calling him "probably one of our the most beautiful independent spirits of all... and this is for him".)

With the victory of the likable if sentimental Once (co-stars Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova did a song from it, but clearly were saving the Oscar-nominated "Falling Slowly" for tomorrow) for Best Foreign Film, it seemed clear the Academy's quite appropriate hand-wringing over their own non-nominees in that category, including today's Spirit also-rans Persepolis (which the Oscars shunted to animation), The Band's Visit (too much English dialog ) and Four Months,Three Weeks, Two Days had fallen on deaf ears in the indie world.

Perhaps the message is that this is the year of mainstreaming for the Spirit Awards while the Oscars go indie in their own fashion. There Will Be Blood opened the day after Christmas and has straggled to around $33 million box office, while No Country at around $60 million since starting its platforming run began on November 9, is about out of gas--unless of course, it wins Best Picture-- at $60 million and will be out on DVD March 11.

Chris Eska, who won the John Cassavettes Award for his immigration-themed August Evening, won an appreciative laugh when he said, "And I've always wanted to thank my agent my agent but I don't have one yet," and the line was a good reminder of the roots underlying this event, which seems to be grinding inexorably towards a more industry, and mainstream-oriented future.

But it was The Office's Wilson--self-described as "Mr. Jokey-joke from T.V.", although he's in Juno for a minute--who enforced a frolicsome but yes, edgy tone as he engaged crowd (and industry) favorite Javier Bardem with a homoerotic proposal ("I've got to learn English somehow," agreed Bardem equably) and chased down Hoffman. The latter event was triggered by his show-closing, "And Phillip Seymour Hoffman, prepare to die--goodnight, everybody!" He got a good spanking, followed by a hug, for his trouble, and the show closed on an effervescent note. Now it's on to the Oscars, and the intriguing prospect that a Juno upset will send that picture screeching towards $200 million.

(Phillip Seymour Hoffman picks up the award for Best Actor at the 2008 FIlm Independent Spirit Awards; photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images)