Jason Kohn gave a great speech when he won the Outstanding Achievement in Nonfiction Filmmaking at the Cinema Eye Honors last week. He spoke about making Manda Bala “out of anger” after watching Marshall Curry’s Streetfight play to an empty theater at a festival in Sao Paulo. “I was so god damn mad. . . because when these movies don’t get seen you feel like you’re fucking losing, you feel like somebody else is winning and that person is no good.”

Earlier in the evening Kohn had spoken about how he felt that Werner Herzog and Errol Morris had been making films in response to each other, in a kind of unintentional dialog. There’s an interesting conversation between Herzog and Morris in the latest copy of The Believer. They talk a little bit about Herzog’s ideas about “ecstatic truth,” a lot about serial killers, and Morris finishes with some great thoughts on the tension between planning and spontaneity in documentary:

I feel that element of spontaneity because so much of what I do is controlled. The element of spontaneity is not knowing what someone is going to say to me in front of the camera, having really no idea, of being surprised. I know that there’s this moment in all of the interviews I’ve loved where something happens. I had this three-minute rule that if you just shut up and let someone talk, within three minutes they will show you how crazy they really are. And it has happened time and time and time again.

If everything was planned, it would be dreadful. If everything was unplanned, it would be equally dreadful. Cinema exists because there are elements of both in everything. There are elements of both in documentary. There are elements of both in feature filmmaking. It’s what makes, I think, photography and filmmaking of interest. Despite all of our efforts to control something, the world is much, much more powerful than us, and more deranged even than us.

Jason Kohn accepting his award. Photo courtesy of IndiePix.

That old “what defines independent” chestnut gets a little tiresome but I read this from Andrew O’Hehir at Salon with interest:

“The academy showers its laurels on a film that has made about $63 million in domestic box office, while the big winner at the supposedly independent Spirit Awards has grossed double that amount.”

Boring Oscars. Interesting Times.

This could have saved me 2 hours and 59 minutes in front of the telly last night!

It’s always long and a little bit silly but I found last night’s Oscars more exhausting than usual. I liked that Diablo Cody was so genuinely choked up and Marion Cotillard’s speech was lovely but everything else left me a little cold. Although it was nice to see Euro-folk win so many awards. Tilda Swinton is beyond cool (even in that bizarre dress).

Amusing titbit from the Guardian Film Blog:

“Every year it’s the same thing. The five nominees for best foreign language film and best documentary are four war movies and one about dance.”

I am pleased for Alex Gibney and Taxi to the Dark Side even though I put No End in Sight on my ballot. I think they’re both excellent documentaries but Gibney is a smart, experienced director and deserves his Oscar.

You can see the full list of Spirit Award winners on indieWIRE. Congrats to all, both winners and nominees. I have to confess that I hadn’t seen a few of the narrative nominees until quite recently and had to do some cramming so I could cast my vote (as a member of IFP). It was really gobsmacking to think that there is so much talent out there that just doesn’t get seen - even when you really love films and live in a city like NYC where it is fairly easy to see most stuff. I don’t really know where I’m going with this except to acknowledge what a herculean task it is to make a film and get it out to an audience so well done to everybody who does it!

There’s so much going on at the moment I feel rather gleefully overwhelmed. The Spirit Awards will be broadcast live on IFC tomorrow at 5pmET but I’m also going to be watching a webcast of the red carpet on IFC.com at 2.30pmET with commentary from SXSW’s Matt Dentler and IFC’s Alison Willmore.

And then of course on Sunday there’s some Oscar something or other happening. I’m going to find a friend with a bigger TV than mine and make some careless financial bets. It makes it more fun when “stakes is high.”

On a smaller scale but no less enjoyable, earlier in the week I went to the Brooklyn Independent Cinema Series night that Michael Tully guest-curated with aplomb. He chose some films that I already know and love (The Zellner’s Foxy and the Weight of the World and the Duplass’s The Intervention) but it’s always a pleasure to watch old favorites with an audience. I finally got a chance to see Matthew Lessner’s clever and rather heartbreaking By Modern Measure and Josh Safdie’s beautiful We’re Going to the Zoo - and I reveled in the wonderful Weekend by Henrik Andersson, a film that makes me want to move to Scandinavia and wear a lot of beige. Check out upcoming screenings from the series - Barbes is always a fun place to drink beer and watch films on a Monday night.

On Tuesday I moderated an IFP Industry Connect panel on alternative distribution options which was very useful for me as I’m currently writing an article on that very subject. There was healthy debate amongst the panelists who brought a wealth of experience working on everything from: new models for theatrical (IFC Films with their day and date strategy), aggregating for iTunes (New Video), digital cinema ventures (Emerging Cinema), new web fundraising strategies (IndieGoGo), and online film sites (IndiePix). I’ll post more feedback in here shortly as the article comes together. It’s a subject I have been thinking about somewhat obsessively of late - for now there’s more discussion on this on the TOOLS blog.

Enjoy the film-tastic weekend!

The Academy has changed the rules for documentaries for the 81st Awards (ie. for the Oscars taking place in 2009), dropping the requirement for a multi-city rollout. Instead docs will now have to screen for 7 days in BOTH Los Angeles County and the Borough of Manhattan, rather than in one or the other as the rules stand now.

Films that reach the semifinal round of voting will no longer be required to provide two film prints to the Academy but will be able to submit in either film or digital format, complying with rigorous Digital Cinema standards.

Read the new rules here:

http://www.oscars.org/81academyawards/rules/rule12.html

And the press release here:

http://www.oscars.org/press/pressreleases/2007/07.10.09a.html