21st Gotham Awards: Hung Jury Means The Tree of Life and Beginners win Best Feature

The 21st Gotham Awards ended with a hung jury: Mike Mills’ “Beginners” and Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life” are both crowned with Best Feature film beating out fellow noms “The Descendants”, “Meek’s Cutoff” and “Take Shelter”. Best Doc went to (a film which I don’t even remember having had a theatrical release) in Katie Galloway and Kelly Duane de la Vega’s “Better This World”. It beat “Bill Cunningham New York” by Richard Press, “Hell and Back Again” by Danfung Dennis, “The Interrupters” by Steve James and “The Woodmans” by C Scott Willis.

In the Best Ensemble Performance, it was Mike Mills’ Beginners crew of Ewan McGregor, Mélanie Laurent, Goran Visnjic, Kai Lennox, Mary Page Keller, Keegan Boos and Christopher Plummer, the veteran actor who should get ready for Best Supporting Actor speeches for the Indie Spirits and Oscars. Beginners beat out several films that had stornger one, two and three punches in “The Descendants”, “Margin Call”, “Martha Marcy May Marlene” and “Take Shelter”.

In the Breakthrough categories we have some surprise winners. In what will help the film gin a little bit more momentum before it gets released in late December (Focus Features 12.28), the Breakthrough Director award went to Dee Rees for “Pariah” – she beat out four nominees who were all competing at Sundance in Mike Cahill for (Another Earth), Vera Farmiga (Higher Ground) Evan Glodell (Bellflower) and our favorite of the group, Sean Durkin for “Martha Marcy May Marlene”. In the Breakthrough Actor category, MMMM was shut out for a third time as Felicity Jones (“Like Crazy”) beat out Elizabeth Olsen, Harmony Santana (Gun Hill Road), Shailene Woodley (The Descendants) and Jacob Wysocki (Terri).

In the Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You category, the lone documentary, Scenes of a Crime from helmers Blue Hadaegh & Grover Babcock beat out the four feature films items: “Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same” – Madeleine Olnek, “Green” – Sophia Takal, “The Redemption of General Butt Naked” – Eric Strauss, Daniele Anastasion and “Without” – Mark Jackson.

And finally in the evening’s newest categories, the Calvin Klein Spotlight on Women Filmmakers “Live the Dream” Grant
– $25,000 cash award for an alumnus of IFP’s Independent Filmmaker Labs – went to Lucy Mulloy for Una Noche (we profiled her just recently in our In the Pipeline series. Jenny Deller’s Future Weather and Rola Nashef’s Detroit Unleaded were fellow noms. In the awkward Audience Award — the TIFF 2010 selected Girlfriend beat “Being Elmo: A Puppeteers Journey”, “Buck”, “The First Grader” and “Wild Horse, Wild Ride”.