With six
nominations, Noah Baumbach's The Squid and the
Whale, the autobiographical tale of two boys dealing
with their parents' divorce, led the list of nominees
for Film Independent's 2006 Independent Spirit Awards,
which were announced Tuesday morning. It will compete
for Best Feature with Brokeback Mountain; Capote;
Good Night, and Good Luck; and The Three Burials
of Melquiades Estrada, which all picked up
four nominations each. Selected from more than 200
submissions, winners of the Independent Spirit Awards, which
recognize American independent features, made for less
than $20 million, will be presented March 4 in Santa
Monica, Calif.
Jeff Daniels, who
plays the novelist dad in Squid, was nominated for
Best Male Lead, along with Philip Seymour Hoffman, who
portrays the title character in Capote; Terrence
Howard, who stars as a pimp who aspires to be a rapper
in Hustle & Flow; Heath Ledger, who's a
taciturn cowboy who falls in love with another man in
Brokeback Mountain; and David Strathairn,
who embodies journalist Edward R. Murrow in Good
Night, and Good Luck.
In the Best
Female Lead category, Squid also earned a
nomination for Laura Linney, who plays a mom who is having
an affair. The category also includes Felicity
Huffman, who appears as a male-to-female transsexual
in Transamerica; Dina Korzun, in the role of a
Russian woman living in Memphis in Forty Shades of
Blue; S. Epatha Merkerson, who runs a boarding
house in Lackawanna Blues; and Cyndi Williams,
who plays a Texas woman haunted by psychic visions in
Room.
Nominees for Best
Supporting Female are Amy Adams, Junebug; Maggie
Gyllenhaal, Happy Endings; Allison Janney, Our
Very Own; Michelle Williams, Brokeback
Mountain; and Robin Wright Penn, Nine Lives.
Those nominated for Best Supporting Male are Firdous
Bamji, The War Within; Matt Dillon,
Crash; Jesse Eisenberg, The Squid and the
Whale; Barry Pepper, The Three Burials of Melquiades
Estrada; and Jeffrey Wright, Broken
Flowers.
Of the Best
Feature nominees, three of the films also picked up
nominations for Best Director: Brokeback's Ang
Lee, Good Night's George Clooney, and Squid's
Noah Baumbach. The other two Best Director nominations
went to Gregg Araki for Mysterious Skin, a tale of
how sexual molestation shapes the lives of two boys;
and Rodrigo Garcia for Nine Lives, a portrait of nine
different women.
Nominations for
Best First Feature, an award that goes to directors as
well as producers, include: Crash,
directed by Paul Haggis and produced by Cathy Schulman, Don
Cheadle, Bob Yari, Mark R. Harris, Bobby Moresco, and
Paul Haggis; Lackawanna Blues, directed by George C.
Wolfe and produced by Nellie Nugiel; Me and You and
Everyone We Know, directed by Miranda July and
produced by Gina Kwon; Thumbsucker, directed by Mike
Mills and produced by Anthony Bregman and Bob
Stephenson; and Transamerica, directed by Duncan
Tucker and produced by Rene Bastian, Sebastian Dungan,
and Linda Moran.
Nominations in
other categories include:
John Cassavetes
Award, for Best First Feature Made for Under $500,000:
Brick, Conventioneers, Jellysmoke, The Puffy
Chair, and Room
Best Screenplay:
Ayad Akhtar, Joseph Castelo, and Tom Glynn for The War
Within; Guillermo Arriaga for The Three Burials of
Melquiades Estrada; Baumbach for The Squid
and the Whale; Dan Futterman for
Capote; and Garcia for Nine Lives
Best First
Screenplay: Kenneth Hanes for Fixing Frank,
July for Me and You and Everyone We Know, Angus
MacLachlan for Junebug, Sabina Murray for
The Beautiful Country, and
Duncan Tucker for Transamerica
Best
Cinematography: Robert Elswit for Good Night, and
Good Luck, John Foster for Keane, Adam
Kimmel for Capote, Chris Menges for The Three
Burials of Melquiades Estrada, and Harris
Savides for Last Days
Best Foreign
Film: Christi Puiu's The Death of Mr. Lazarescu
(Romania); Fernando Eimbcke's Duck Season
(Mexico); Fatih Akin's Head-On
(Germany/Turkey); Hany Abu-Assad's Paradise Now
(Palestine/Netherlands/Germany/France), and Jun Ichikawa's
Tony Takitani (Japan)
Best Documentary:
Alex Gibney's Enron: The Smartest Guys in the
Room; Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man; Scott Dalton
and Margarita Martinez's La Sierra; Mark
Becker's Romantico; and David Zeiger's Sir! No Sir!
The IFC/Acura
Someone to Watch Award, recognizing a filmmaker "who
has not yet received appropriate recognition": Ian Gamazon
and Neill Dela Llana, directors of Cavite;
Robinson Devor, director of Police Beat; and
Jay Duplass, director of The Puffy Chair
The Truer Than
Fiction Award, presented to an emerging director of
nonfiction features: Rachel Boynton for Our Brand
Is Crisis; Garrett Scott and Ian Olds for
Occupation: Dreamland; Mark Becker for
Romantico; and Thomas Allen Harris for Twelve
Disciples of Nelson Mandela
The AMC/American
Express Producers Award, honoring emerging producers:
Caroline Baron for Capote and Monsoon Wedding;
Ram Bergman for Brick and Conversations With
Other Women; and Mike S. Ryan for Junebug and
Palindromes. (Gregg Kilday, via Reuters)
