LA LA LAND Leads Oscar Nominations

The 2017 Oscar nominations were announced online this morning with a global event filmed in six different cities.

Moving the Academy away from the #OscarsSoWhite controversy, seven actors of color were nominated this year, with Denzel Washington in the race for Best Actor for Fences and Loving's Ruth Negga earning a nomination as Best Actress. In supporting categories, actresses Viola Davis (Fences), Naomie Harris (Moonlight) and Octavia Spencer (Hidden Figures) were nominated along with actor Mahershala Ali (Moonlight). English-Indian actor Dev Patel is also in the Best Supporting Actor race for Lion, and Moonlight's director Barry Jenkins was nominated, only the third African-American in Oscar history in the Best Director category. Who are the others? John Singleton was nominated in 1991 for Boyz in the Hood, followed by Lee Daniels in 2009 for Precious. In 2014, England's Steve McQueen became the first black Brit to earn a Best Director Oscar nod. His film, 12 Years a Slave, won Best Picture that year, although Mexico's Alfonso Cuarón won Best Director for Gravity, making Cuarón the first Latin American man to win in that category.

La La Land and its whopping 14 nominations -- tying All About Eve and Titanic for the most ever -- shows that it doesn't hurt your Oscar chances to keep Hollywood and a reverence for old movies front and center in your film. That didn't help the Coen Brothers' Hail Caesar, however, which took only one nomination, for its production design.

If there were any surprises on the list, it was probably that the Hollywood Powers That Be have apparently forgiven Mel Gibson for his many public transgressions, nominating him for Best Director for Hacksaw Ridge, while overlooking Amy Adams, considered a likely prospect for a Best Actress nod, Finding Dory, not one of the choices for Best Animated Feature, and Martin Scorsese and his film Silence, greeted with a whole lot of silence instead of nominations. Silence did earn a cinematography nod for Rodrigo Prieto.

At the moment, given all its nominations and the buzz going in, La La Land is certainly the front-runner for Best Picture. But it has engendered some controversy for its lily-white take on jazz as an art form as well as some unapologetic mansplaining, so the stunner that is Moonlight might just sneak in there by the time the Oscar ceremony rolls around on February 26th. I hope so. Moonlight deserves it.

Here's a list of nominees in major categories:

BEST PICTURE
Arrival
Fences
Hacksaw Ridge
Hell or High Water
Hidden Figures
La La Land
Lion
Manchester by the Sea
Moonlight

BEST ACTOR
Casey Affleck, Manchester by the Sea
Andrew Garfield, Hacksaw Ridge
Ryan Gosling, La La Land
Viggo Mortensen, Captain Fantastic
Denzel Washington, Fences

BEST ACTRESS
Isabelle Huppert, Elle
Ruth Negga, Loving
Emma Stone, La La Land
Natalie Portman, Jackie
Meryl Streep, Florence Foster Jenkins

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Mahershala Ali, Moonlight
Jeff Bridges, Hell or High Water
Lucas Hedges, Manchester by the Sea
Dev Patel, Lion
Michael Shannon, Nocturnal Animals

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Viola Davis, Fences
Naomie Harris, Moonlight
Nicole Kidman, Lion
Octavia Spencer, Hidden Figures
Michelle Williams, Manchester by the Sea

BEST DIRECTOR
Damien Chazelle, La La Land
Mel Gibson, Hacksaw Ridge
Barry Jenkins, Moonlight
Kenneth Lonergan, Manchester by the Sea
Denis Villeneuve, Arrival

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
Luke Davies, Lion
Eric Heisserer, Arrival
Barry Jenkins, Story by Tarell Alvin McCraney, Moonlight
Allison Schroeder and Theodore Melfi, Hidden Figures
August Wilson, Fences

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
Damien Chazelle, La La Land
Yorgos Lanthimos and Efthimis Filippou, The Lobster
Kenneth Lonergan, Manchester by the Sea
Mike Mills, 20th Century Women
Taylor Sheridan, Hell or High Water 

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
Greig Fraser, Lion
James Laxton, Moonlight
Rodrigo Prieto, Silence
Linus Sandgren, La La Land
Bradford Young, Arrival 

BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM
Land of Mine (Denmark)
A Man Called Ove (Sweden)
The Salesman (Iran)
Tanna (Australia)
Toni Erdmann (Germany)

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE
Kubo and the Two Strings
Moana
My Life as a Zucchini
The Red Turtle
Zootopia

For the complete list of nominations and more information about the February 26 Oscar ceremony, click here for the Academy Awards official site.

Diversity and Innovation: Nominees for 2017 Film Independent Spirit Awards

The Film Independent Spirit Awards nominees were announced last week, with Matt Warren's official announcement at the Film Independent site echoing a lot of what a lot of us are feeling as awards season begins. Warren notes that he understands that the usual anticipation of awards and the hoopla that accompanies them may "seem like an indulgence of attention that most Americans can no longer afford." He continues, "But beyond the glamor of the celebrity carpet, bright lights and pewter awards statuettes, the Film Independent Spirit Awards stand for something much deeper: championing creative independence in visual storytelling and supporting a community of artists who embody diversity, innovation and uniqueness of vision – a mission that is more relevant now than ever before."

Although the Spirit Awards have in recent years tended to look a lot like the Oscars' list, this year their choices demonstrate that touted creative independence and uniqueness of vision, going for smaller, more interesting movies that may or may not find favor with the big Academy boys. By spotlighting and supporting films like American Honey and Moonlight, which each earned six nominations, the Spirit Awards have shown exactly why they exist and why they're important.

American Honey was written and directed by Andrea Arnold, a British filmmaker with an eye for female protagonists. This time, her story involves a reckless and restless teenage girl, played by Sasha Lane, who takes off with a group of rootless kids who travel in a van around the dire vistas of Nebraska and Oklahoma selling magazine subscriptions door to door. A. O. Scott of the New York Times called American Honey "an episodic travelogue, a coming-of-age chronicle and an indictment of grim social conditions, with roughly equal measures of Jack Kerouac, J. D. Salinger and Charles Dickens in its DNA."

Although Moonlight is also a coming-of-age drama, its look and focus are quite different from American Honey, reflecting the fact that their settings – the Walmart-littered landscape of the Great Plains versus the "bold, blue, beautiful darkness" of Miami – look worlds apart. Based on a play called In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue by Tarell Alvin McCraney, Moonlight is centered around the pain, struggle and hope that surrounds a young African-American boy named Chiron at three different times in his life, as he tries to figure out who he is and how he fits in. In the Washington Post, Ann Hornaday says that Moonlight is "a perfect film, one that exemplifies not only the formal and aesthetic capabilities of a medium at its most visually rich, but a capacity for empathy and compassion that reminds audiences of one of the chief reasons why we go to movies: to be moved, opened up and maybe permanently changed." This year's Robert Altman Award, given to one film and its director (Barry Jenkins), casting director and ensemble cast, will be awarded to Moonlight.

Here are some of the nominees in major categories:

BEST FEATURE
American Honey
Chronic 
Jackie 
Manchester by the Sea 
Moonlight 

BEST DIRECTOR
Andrea Arnold, American Honey
Barry Jenkins, Moonlight
Pablo Larraín, Jackie
Jeff Nichols, Loving
Kelly Reichardt, Certain Women

BEST FEMALE LEAD
Annette Bening, 20th Century Women
Isabelle Huppert, Elle
Sasha Lane, American Honey
Ruth Negga, Loving
Natalie Portman, Jackie

BEST MALE LEAD
Casey Affleck, Manchester by the Sea
David Harewood, Free In Deed
Viggo Mortensen, Captain Fantastic
Jesse Plemons, Other People
Tim Roth, Chronic

BEST SUPPORTING FEMALE
Edwina Findley, Free In Deed
Paulina Garcia, Little Men
Lily Gladstone, Certain Women
Riley Keough, American Honey
Molly Shannon, Other People

BEST SUPPORTING MALE
Ralph Fiennes, A Bigger Splash
Ben Foster, Hell or High Water
Lucas Hedges, Manchester by the Sea
Shia LaBeouf, American Honey
Craig Robinson, Morris From America

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
Ava Berkofsky, Free In Deed
Lol Crawley, The Childhood of a Leader
Zach Kuperstein, The Eyes of My Mother
James Laxton, Moonlight
Robbie Ryan, American Honey

BEST SCREENPLAY
Barry Jenkins (screenplay), Tarell Alvin McCraney (story), Moonlight
Kenneth Lonergan, Manchester by the Sea
Mike Mills, 20th Century Women
Ira Sachs, Mauricio Zacharias, Little Men
Taylor Sheridan, Hell or High Water

You'll find the entire list of Spirit Award nominees here. The Awards will be presented February 25, 2017 in a tent on the beach next to the Santa Monica pier. They will also be broadcast on the Independent Film Channel.