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Historicizing the Independent Awards Race: Manohla Dargis Speaks with Scott Macaulay
Photo by Jem Cohen A garish panel from an R. Crumb cartoon was the cover of Filmmaker’s spring 1995 edition. Inside were interviews with Hal Hartley, David Salle, Lourdes Portillo and Gregory Nava; a David Leitner article on new trends in film lighting; a survey of new independent distributors; and Mikki Halpin on how the internet could help independent filmmakers. Finally, there was “The Vision Thing,” Manohla Dargis’s take on the Spirit Awards, the fundraiser of our co-publisher at the time, the IFP/West (now Film Independent). It was a pivotal year for the Spirits: they had previously announced that for the first time films financed by major studios would be eligible for the awards, a decision that led to Darnell Martin’s I Like It Like That, a Columbia Pictures production, receiving two nominations. (“A Bit More Dependence Than in the Past,” is how the Los Angeles Times headlined the news.)
The change also helped the awards reckon, somewhat, with the fact that “independent” companies such as Miramax and New Line were, at that point, owned by studios and conglomerates (Disney and Turner, respectively). Still, the eligibility change signaled a shift—an overlap between the Independent Spirits and the Oscars—that has continued in the years since. Following this news, Filmmaker asked Manohla Dargis—then a film critic with LA Weekly—to cover the 1995 Spirit Awards and bring an independent voice, one unaffiliated with our co-publisher. She wound up delivering a sustained critique of the Spirits and their new eligibility rules as well as a meditation, both impassioned and sorrowful, on the increasingly symbiotic relationship between film non-profits and the larger industry.
“If nothing else, the nominations for the 1995 Spirit Awards prove that more than ever before the very definition of independent film is up for grabs,” she wrote. “In much the same way that Sundance is the bellwether of American independent film, the IFP/West Spirit Awards is its affirmation. Now in its tenth year, the award ceremony has in the past offered admirable opportunities for the Indies to celebrate their differences, financial and otherwise. But months after the Spirits’ new eligibility guidelines were announced, the IFP/West has wound up with a nomination slate that begs the question: What’s independence got to do with it?”
Via Zoom earlier this year, Dargis, now the chief film critic at the New York Times, remembered attending the 1995 Spirit Awards, where that Filmmaker issue containing her critique was distributed to all attendees. She laughs, “They were on every seat! I think it was the first time I had ever gone to the event, and it just felt like ‘Hollywood’ but with less money It felt like this organization wants to be the Oscars and, as it turns out, [IFP/West executive director] Dawn Hudson left for the Academy.”
The question of what defines an independent film is one that Filmmaker has grappled with throughout its history. It’s a question “that bedevils and confounds and also is entertaining for a lot of us,” Dargis admits. “Everybody draws the line differently, but it was just so transparent that once they changed what they were going to consider, [the Spirits] weren’t really interested in the different or the marginal. They were not really interested in these kinds of artists or in regional or really low-budget films.” (In 2000, the John Cassavetes Award was added to honor films produced for less than half-a-million.)
The Spirit Awards would see further eligibility changes. In 2006, a $20 million budget cap was established. It rose to $22.5 million in 2019, then to today’s $30 million. Meanwhile, across the country, the Gotham Awards, produced by Filmmaker publisher The Gotham Institute for Film & Media (previously IFP), was initiated in 1991 as a fundraising evening of tributes to New York City film luminaries. (Director Jonathan Demme and DuArt Lab founder Irwin Young were early honorees.) After taking place for its first 13 editions during September’s IFP Film Week, in 2004 the Gothams moved to the first Monday after Thanksgiving—before the Spirit Awards and hence strategically at the beginning of awards season, adding competitive categories like “Best Picture” in the process. Over the years, Gotham eligibility rules would fluctuate, too. In 2006, controversy ensued over nominations for Martin Scorsese’s $90 million The Departed. (It lost Best Picture to Half Nelson.) In the following years, an “economy of means” restriction was added, then a budget cap, which rose to $35 million before being eliminated in 2023, allowing films such as Barbie and this year’s winner, One Battle After Another, to compete.
“There are those who see the infusion of studio money into the independent film scene in essentially positive terms,” wrote Dargis in 1995. “I’m less sanguine.” She wrote somewhat presciently about Miramax in that piece: “Still, whatever the complaints about Miramax, the company’s indie identity remains strongly in effect, one reason the blood-soaked, smack-happy, profane-loving Pulp Fiction is widely seen as a coup for the mini-major and not Disney. Part of that has to do with the perverse aura surrounding the Weinsteins themselves, the kind that finds brothers (namely Harvey) featured in the gossip columns and palling around with the likes of Madonna. Increasingly, it seems, that while Miramax acts, everyone else reacts.”
“I feel like Miramax fucked everything up and we are still figuring things out,” Dargis says today. “Small, real independent movies were basically just a stepping stone [for Harvey Weinstein], and I think we’re still living in that world. We paid too much attention to the most popular movies and box office receipts. We were no longer talking about the art. It was about money and bigness and popularity, and that infiltrated into everything. We haven’t recovered from what happened when independent cinema became ‘indie,’ or ‘Indiewood.’” And about “storytelling,” the aggressively anodyne word favored by non-profits these days, Dargis says, “It’s gross. You know what a good word is? ‘Art.’ So is ‘film.’”
“If ever there were evidence of a crisis in the definition of independent film, much less its purpose, then this is the year,” wrote Dargis in 1995, but 2025 has its problems as well. “I feel completely confident that the movies will continue, but obviously the industry is a really big fucking mess right now,” Dargis says. “There was the Miramax’ing of independent cinema, and now we’re dealing with the Netflix’ing of the industry and the conceit that ‘theatrical is dead,’ you know? I’m not sure something that’s been around for a century and makes a lot of money is going to die just because Netflix says it’s dead.”
Today, the siren call of Awards Season has never been stronger. Whatever existential qualms caused organizations to agonize over “economy of means” is largely gone. In fairness, the excitement of the horserace and recognition at a starry ceremony lures much investment, from companies as well as individuals, into the independent film space, leading to the production of many worthy movies. Distributor spending sustains independent theaters, projectionists and virtually every non-profit or publication with a mailing list available for FYC blasts, including Filmmaker. Still, Dargis’s 1995 closer haunts: “Worse still, as the independents struggle to define themselves and cut themselves a bigger piece of the pie, they’re the ones being eaten up. And either they don’t even know it, or maybe they just don’t care.”
Asked what film organizations should be doing in the years ahead, Dargis replies, “I think they should be championing the art. I think that they should be embracing every single thing that the forces of repression don’t like, whether we’re talking about corporate entities or government entities. Embrace diversity, embrace equality, embrace inclusion. Embrace small and really ragged, independent, obnoxious movies.”
And, perhaps, go on a staff retreat: “They should go on a picnic and think about what they love and why they started in this world to begin with. What was actually important to them? Was it being able to know certain people? Or was it just the love of movies?”
