At Gothams, troubled waters and frozen rivers

By Steven Zeitchik

The Gotham Awards tweaks the formula a little bit each year, looking for that perfect awards-show alchemy and/or some Britney moments to call its own.

It's aways a careful balance, this attempt at controlled wackiness -- go too far and it feels contrived and VMA-ish; don't go far enough and it's the forced patter of every other awards show in Christendom.

Indian comic and Daily Show regular Aasif Mandvi basically struck out as host with a tough crowd as he tried a series of outsourcing and ethnic jokes. But Tuesday night's gathering at the Cipriani down on New York's Wall Street mostly pulled it off as the show celebrated the strong and often melancholy indie films of the year, getting the spontaneity and awards-routines going in basically the right proportions.

But then spontaneity is what you get when Mickey Rourke shows up to present an award with his hand under his, um, belt. (Co-presenter Patricia Clarkson: "I was all prepared for lots of things, lots and lots of things. Thirteen and a half long weeks.")

Ethan Hawke, upon presenting the ensemble awards, got in a good quip with "I'm supposed to read the names of all the casting directors but none of them ever put me in a movie so I'm not going to."

Or Melvin Van Peebles, talking about the indie struggle as he accepted a lifetime achievement award. "I just made a movie. I got not money; i got no distributor. Same thing as always," but then, "There are people out there willing to fight this fight."

"Frozen River" got the big best feature win, proving that there really is such a thing as awards-season love for truly indie cinema (and indie it was for the William Morris Independent pic, a fact director Courtney Hunt underscored when she noted: "Thank you to my husband, who raised the f$@%ing money for this movie.")

The night, incidentally, also proved how Sony Classics almost singlehandedly is keeping mainstream distribution of indie films alive; if you didn't get that from the many ambitious movies they savvily put in theaters this year ("Rachel Getting Married," "Frozen River," "Synecdoche, NY"), then you did from all the shout-outs to "Michael and Tom" from the stage.

Finally, Sheila Nevins didn't disappoint with her...effervescence. After Liz Smith introed the HBO Docs queen as a "dizzy, ditzy," witty, nutjob," Nevins gave a non-thank you thank you speech -- or was it the other way around?

"I know I'm supposed to thank people...I'd thank my mother and father but my father wanted me to be a nurse and my mother wanted me to nurse her. So I'm not thanking them."

And: "I cant' thank my producers and directors because they couldn't come here -- they cant afford a thousand dollars a ticket (She did thank her documentaries' subjects.)

And then she summed up her philosophy -- and maybe that of a film zeitgeist turning out feelgood tales like "Frozen River," "Trouble the Water" and "Synecdoche:" "You can't come up with an idea," she said with what seemed like perfect sincerity, "if you feel good about yourself."

Comments

[Fozia]

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Fozia