By Robert Goldrich

SANTA MONICA, Calif. --

The Artist continued its impressive awards run, topping today’s Independent Spirit Awards with four wins: Best Picture; Best Director for Michel Hazanavicius; Best Cinematography for Guillaume Schiffman; and Best Actor for Jean Dujardin.

Dujardin and Schiffman were not on hand to accept their awards as they were traveling back to Los Angeles for Sunday’s Oscars after the Cesar awards in France on Friday where The Artist copped six prizes. Hazanavicius, however, managed to get back from the Cesar ceremony in time for the Spirit Awards. He made a rushed trip, noting backstage that he got a big kick out of “the police escort” from the airport.

Next behind The Artist in the Spirit countdown of major category winners was The Descendants with a pair: Best Screeplay for writer/director Alexander Payne and writers Nat Faxon and Jim Rash; and Best Supporting Actress for Shailene Woodley. In accepting the screenplay honor, Payne related that he, Faxon and Rash had the decided advantage of the brilliant novel on which the film was based, authored by Kaui Hart Hemmings who was in the Spirit Awards audience.
   Michelle Williams took the Best Actress Spirit for her portrayal of Marilyn Monroe in My Week With Marilyn. In her acceptance remarks, Williams recalled her first visit to the Spirit Awards ceremony 10 years ago. Back then, she wore her own clothes and cut her own hair, and neither looked very good. But somehow that was okay at the Spirit celebration, “possibly even preferred”–and that began her kinship with the Spirit ceremony and attendees. She observed that this kinship is rooted in the fact that the Spirit proceedings are full of “misfits, outcasts, loners, dreamers, mumblers, delinquents, dropouts and dreamers…Just like me.”
   Garnering Best Supporting Actor honors was Christopher Plummer who plays a widower facing his own death and reaching a crossroads when he discloses to his family that he is gay. Plummer, who is the Oscar favorite, having also won the SAG Award, among other kudos, for his performance, said in accepting the Spirit Award, ‘I raise my glass to dear Michael Mills who’s given me this extraordinary gift [of Beginners].”

Spotmaking ties    Mills himself was at one time involved in commercialmaking; in fact he was one of the founders of production house The Directors Bureau.
    Others currently with spotmaking ties who scored impressively at this year’s Spirit Awards were directors J.C. Chandor and Steve James.  The latter won for Best Documentary on the strength of The Interrupters.
    Chandor won the Best First Feature Spirit Award for his Wall Street thriller Margin Call, which also took the coveted Robert Altman Award, the Spirit’s Best Creative Ensemble honor spanning its director, casting directors and cast. Chandor, who wrote and helmed the film, recently secured representation as a commercial director, signing with Washington Square Films, the company which produced Margin Call.

James is a noted documentarian who directs commercials via Nonfiction Unlimited. James and writer Alex Kotlowitz accepted the Best Documentary Spirit onstage. The Interrupters was based on a New York Times Magazine story by reporter Kotlowitz on the group CeaseFire, a Chicago organization started by M.D. Gary Slutkin, a professor for Epidemiology and Public Health at the University of Illinois, Chicago’s School of Public Health. Upon returning to his home town of Chicago after treating diseases in Africa, Slutkin sought out his next project. He saw that violence in Chicago was on the upswing and had the notion of taking the public health model and applying it to the problem, treating violence as a disease. He hooked up with Tio Hardiman, who is now director of CeaseFire Illinois. Hardiman had the idea of “violence interrupters” who try to mediate potential violent situations and keep those situations from escalating. Ex-cons, former gang bangers and drug dealers, these “interrupters” earlier in their lives were involved in violence themselves and thus had a first-hand knowledge and street credibility that helped them to combat and prevent violent situations.

Hardiman himself was a street hustler, battling drug addiction until he turned his life around. He has seen the successful CeaseFire program in Chicago expand to dozens of communities outside the State of Illinois.

Produced by Kartemquin Films, The Interrupters provides a cinema verite look into the lives of three interrupters over the course of a year: Ameena Matthews, Cobe Williams, and Eddie Bocanegra. For example, Bocanegra is haunted by a murder he committed at the age of 17. His CeaseFire work is part of his repentance for what he did.

Cassavetes Award, Int’l. Film, First Screenplay
Rounding out the Spirit Award winners announced on a Saturday afternoon at the ceremony’s famed tent venue on the Santa Monica beach were:

o Pariah from writer/director Dee Rees won the coveted John Cassavetes Award, bestowed upon the best feature made for under $500,000.

o A Separation, from Iran, took the Best International Film honor. Diretor was Asghar Farhadi.

o Will Reiser won the Best First Screenplay Spirit Award for the comedy/drama 50/50.

Fellowships
Two new filmmaker grants were awarded during the ceremony, which was emceed by actor/writer/producer Seth Rogen. The 2012 Chaz and Roger Ebert Fellowship, which recognizes a social issue documentary and includes a cash grant of $10,000, was given to Katie Fairfax Wright and Malika Zouhali-Worrall, co-directors of the documentary Call Me Kuchu. The film was developed in the 2011 Documentary Lab of Film Independent (the nonprofit arts organization that produces the Spirit Awards and the Los Angeles Film Festival), and had its world premiere at the 2012 Berlin Film Festival, where it won the Teddy Award for Best Documentary.

And the 2012 Giorgio Armani Directing Fellowship, which includes a cash grant of $10,000, was awarded to Grace Lee, director of the documentary American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs. The film, currently in postproduction, is in Film Independent’s 2012 Documentary Lab.

Other grant winners
On January 14–and acknowledged during today’s ceremony–the following winners were honored at the Spirit Awards Filmmaker Grant and Nominee Brunch:

o The 18th annual Audi Someone to Watch Award was given to Mark Jackson, director of Without. The $25,000 unrestricted grant, funded for the first time by Audi, recognizes a talented filmmaker of singular vision who has not received appropriate recognition.

 o The 17th Annual Nokia Truer Than Fiction Award was bestowed upon Heather Courtney, director of Where Soldiers Come From. The $25,000 unrestricted grant, funded by Nokia, is presented to an emerging director of non-fiction features who has not yet received significant recognition.

o The 15th Annual Piaget Producers Award went to Sophia Lin, producer of Take Shelter. The $25,000 unrestricted grant, funded by Piaget, is presented to an emerging producer who, despite highly limited resources, demonstrates the creativity, tenacity and vision required to produce quality independent films.

o And the 2nd Annual Jameson Find Your Audience Award, which helps low-budget independent film find a broader audience, was given to Benjamin Murray and Alysa Nahmias, co-directors of Unfinished Spaces. The $40,000 marketing and distribution grant, funded by Jameson Irish Whiskey, was designed to meet independent filmmakers’ biggest challenge–how to get their films out into the marketplace.

MySHOOT Profiles