The 2011 gongs season got underway last night with the presentation of the Gotham Independent Film Awards at Cipriani Wall Street in Manhattan. The climactic event of the evening ended in a stalemate with Mike Mills’s comedy-drama “Beginners” (released by Focus Features) and Terrence Malick’s metaphysical “The Tree of Life” (Fox Searchlight) voted joint winners of the Best Feature Award. As Natalie Portman explained in a specially made video, she and the others jurors — fellow actresses Jodie Foster and Nicole Kidman, producer Anne Carey, and film editor Lee Percy — were loathe to decide between the two films.
This result doesn’t augur particularly well for Alexander Payne’s family drama “The Descendants” (Fox Searchlight), a likely Academy Award contender, for the rest of the awards season. The other unlucky nominees were Kelly Reichardt’s reisionist Western “Meek’s Cutoff” (Oscilloscope) and Jeff Nichols’s apocalyptic drama “Take Shelter” (Sony Pictures Classics).
It was the second time in the Gothams’ 21-year history that the feature award has been shared. In 2001, when the category was known as the Open Palm, John Cameron Mitchell’s “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” tied with Henry Bean’s “The Believer.”
“Beginners,” about a terminally ill man, played by Christopher Plummer, who tells his son (Ewan McGregor) that he has taken a younger male lover, was also awarded the Gotham for Best Ensemble Performance. The awards will build considerable momentum for Golden Globe and Oscar nominations for Plummer, who turns 82 on December 13. He was nominated for the 2010 Supporting Actor Globe and Oscar for his portrayal of Tolstoy in “The Last Station,” having never been previously nominated by either awards body.
There are no individual Gothams for best lead and supporting actors and actresses, but the Independent Film Project, which runs the awards, acknowledges outstanding perfomances in its Breakthrough Actor category. This year’s winner was the 18-year-old English actress Felicity Jones, who in “Like Crazy” (Paramount Vantage) plays a British exchange student who falls in love with an American student but is unable to stay with him because she overstays the limit on her visa. Also nominated were Elizabeth Olsen (“Martha Marcy May Marlene”), Harmony Santana (“Gun Hill Road”), Shailene Woodley (“The Descendants”), and Jacob Wysocki (“Terri”). Olsen and Woodley will continue to compete with Jones for the slot traditionally reserved for ingénues in the Best Supporting Actress Oscar category.
Brooklyn-based Dee Rees won the Breakthrough Director Award for her first feature, “Pariah” (Focus Features), which she adapted from her 2007 short of the same name. It’s a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age drama about a gay African-American teenager struggling to keep her sexual identity from her parents.
The Audience Award, voted by 15,000 film festivalgoers, went to Justin Lerner’s sensitive drama “Girlfriend” (Elephant Eye), the first American feature to star an actor, Evan Sneider, with Down syndrome. Sneider plays a young man with a crush on a former schoolmate (Shannon Woodward), a down-on-her-luck single mom with a volatile boyfriend.
“Better This World” (PBS/POV) was voted the Best Documentary. Kelly Duane and Kate Galloway’s film tells of two young men from Texas who fell in with a radical activist-cum-FBI informer and were accused of intending to firebomb the 2008 Republican National Convention; it extends to an analysis of how the war on terror has affected civil liberties post 9/11. Another hard-hitting documentary, Blue Hadaegh and Grover Babcock’s “Scenes From a Crime,” won the award for unreleased films and will get a theatrical window as a result. A case study for the causes of wrongful confession, it shows footage from a 10-hour police interrogation of a man from Troy, New York, who was psychologically coerced into admitting he murdered his baby. He later recanted and medical evidence undermined the confession.
Honorary Gotham awards were give to actors Charlize Theron and Gary Oldman, director David Cronenberg, and Fox CEO Tom Rothman, who founded Fox Searchlight 17 years ago.