This Week in Gossip #16

This issue is very politics-heavy. It has to be.

1. The Independent Spirit Awards Skewed Oscar-Ready While Trying to Ignore Protestors’ Cries

The 39th Film Independent Spirit Awards took place on Sunday, honouring indie movies and TV. Past Lives won Best Feature, with its director Celine Song also taking home Best Director. Jeffrey Wright won Best Lead Performance for American Fiction and Da'Vine Joy Randolph, the undisputed lock of the season, won Best Supporting Performance. Awards were also given to Anatomy of a Fall, May December, A Thousand and One, and Beef. It was not a night of surprises. Well, except for the way the room dealt with protestors outside.

A small but vocal group of protestors were located on the beach in Santa Monica by the tent set up for the ceremony. They chanted in favour of a ceasefire in Gaza and offered support for Palestine. If you watch clips of the show, you can hear them in the background. Host Aidy Bryant did reference them, and one presenter, Jimmy O. Yang, called them "hecklers." Uh... Directors Babak Jalali and Kelly Reichardt made more active references to them and the former offered support. Critic Tomris Laffly was able to speak to one of the protestors, Vivian Wiseman, about their choice to disrupt this ceremony. They said, "We want everyone to know that the activists and the people who care are going to disrupt them wherever they go because we believe in love, we believe in peace, and we believe in liberation of the Palestinian people."

This has been an awards season remarkably free of political speeches, which is notable if only because the industry loves to use this moment as a soap box. It's been tough to ignore how few people in the business have been able to even bring themselves to say the word "Palestine." One of the producers of The Zone of Interest did so during their BAFTA speech, which wasn't shown in its entirety during the ceremony (and honestly, I'm stunned the BBC even included the snippet of him mentioning Gaza.)

As thousands of people, many of them children, are killed in Gaza, it’s tough to ignore the sentiment that too many people are either scared to confront the issue or just don’t care. We’ve already seen Tiffany Haddish flying to Israel to soak up the propaganda. Debra Messing has sunk further into irrelevance by bragging about how safe she felt in the region (yeah, because you weren’t in the open air prison behind the walls.) After Melissa Barrera was sacked from the Scream franchise, thus causing the next sequel to basically implode, any sort of support for a ceasefire feels like a risky career move. Such is the horror and absurdity of the situation, but it also doesn’t reflect America at large, where pro-ceasefire protests and support for the Palestinian people are happening across the nation in major numbers. Groups like Jewish Voice for Peace are doing incredible work to combat a lot of ingrained assumptions about Israel and its highly lucrative relationship with the USA (not that my side of the ocean is free from this, of course.)

So, when you see a room full of celebrities smiling and drinking as they try not to pay attention to what’s going outside, you wonder if the metaphor is too obvious. To quote Kyle Buchanan of the New York Times, "after 2 seasons where Ukraine came up at every awards show, it’s notable what isn’t being talked about now." At least the protestors weren’t dragged away? The bar is low, people.

Jumping from that to the topic of awards season feels a bit blinkered, right? It’s my job, and I still feel weird about it. politics and Hollywood have always been intertwined, of course, if not always in the most obvious ways. I wouldn’t say any of the winners here were seen as motivated by the current context. They’re all worthy winners, though, if pretty predictable. Film Independent is a not-for-profit arts organization that used to produce the LA Film Festival. The Spirit Awards are voted on by members of that group. You pay the fee and you can vote. It's a looser affair than the Oscars, more interested in, you know, indie cinema. But over the past 15 years or so, the big winners have typically reflected the Oscars' tastes. Often, they don't seem especially indie. No offence to last year's big winner, Everything Everywhere All at Once, but wouldn't it have been cool to see some love for the likes of A Love Song, Palm Trees and Power Lines, Bruiser, and The Cathedral? We as critics have so few true opportunities to celebrate genuinely independent cinema, so it feels important to latch onto ones like this. But eh, awards season always ends up being a self-fulfilling prophecy.

And ceasefire now.

2. Anyone But You Crosses $200 million Worldwide; Rom-Coms are Back, Baby!

When Sony dropped its rom-com Anyone But You in theatres just before Christmas, it wasn't expected to be a big hit. Its competition included an Illumination animated movie, a prestigious biographical drama, and a superhero sequel. In its opening weekend, it finished fourth at the box office and fell behind its projected weekend gross. But then something happened: the movie stuck around. Now, ten weeks into its theatrical release, the movie has grossed over $86 million domestically and is the first rom-com in half a decade to cross $200 million worldwide since Crazy Rich Asians.