“The Wrestler” pins the competition; as “Frozen River,” “Milk” and Penelope Cruz are also among the winners at the annual indie kudo-fest but that doesn’t mean they will do well at the Oscars

By Alex Ben Block

Mickey had a stranglehold on Indie Spirit Awards

SANTA MONICA, CA. (Hollywood Today) – Melissa Leo, Penelope Cruz and James Franco were among the winners at the 2009 Film Independent Spirit Awards on Saturday but the buzz was about best actor winner Mickey Rourke, whose career has been resurrected by his role as a washed up loser in “The Wrestler,” which was also named best picture and honored for its cinematography.
In an amusing, often rambling, profanity-laced, oddly humble acceptance speech, Rourke praised his pal, actor Eric Roberts (who he said also deserves a chance at a comeback), his co-star Marisa Tomei (after almost forgetting her name), his director Darren Aronofsky (who he called a tough SOB), wrestling promoter Vince McMahon and the WWE (for being supportive even though the film exposed things “like steroids and the cocaine and banging a girl…in the bathroom”), and Fox studio executives (although he got the studio co-chairman’s name wrong).
Rourke dedicated his win to Loki, his 18-year-old pet Chihuahua who died last week. “This is for you baby,” exclaimed the 58-year-old actor, who had said in his darkest days it was the love of his dogs that gave him strength to keep going.
When he won as best actor at the Golden Globe Awards, Rourke talked about how tough Aronofsky had been on him, causing the director to give the actor the middle finger salute on national television. On Saturday he again called the director “one tough son of a bitch,” adding that he knew Aronofsky wouldn’t like him saying that “because he goes, ‘Mickey, you’ll scare all the other actors away from me.’ But Darren, you know what, if they ain’t got the balls to bring it, then f–k ‘em, you know.”
Whatever happens at the much more buttoned down Academy Awards, where Rourke is in a tight best actor race with “Milk” star Sean Penn (who did not show up for the Spirit Awards), he clearly felt the love from the star studded crowd of actors, filmmakers and press who packed into a giant tent only yards from the Pacific Ocean. As Aronofsky later said “this is the perfect awards ceremony for Mickey because it’s the only one that actually encourages vulgarity on the stage.”

And that is what he delivered. “I just got done talking to the Santa Monica Police Department,” said Rourke at one point. “They gave me a bed to sleep in 10 years ago. And I thank them-I asked them for two pillows, they told me to f–k off.”

Rourke didn’t come back stage after his win to talk with reporters but Aronofsky did. He said casting Rourke “wasn’t a slam dunk” because “his reputation was so bad.” The director said that he “had to sit with him and meet with him to make sure he was up for it. I knew it was going to a real big challenge to get it right making it with Mickey Rourke….(But) when you look into his eyes you see that there is no other talent like him on the planet.”
Curiously, Aronofsky lost out as best director to Tom McCarthy, who helmed “The Visitor,” while that movies star, Richard Jenkins, lost out to Rourke as best actor.
Asked how he came to do a movie about pro wrestling, Aronofsky said, “We saw that it was a world no one ever tackled in a serious way…I think most people, before ‘The Wrestler’ came out, saw wrestling as a joke, because it is fake. But the more we looked at that world, the more complex it seemed…That’s why people go to the movies, to see something they’ve never seen before and no one has ever seen that.”
Another big winner at the Spirit Awards was veteran actress Melissa Leo, and her ultra low budget movie “Frozen River,” about a women who smuggles people across the Canadian border. Showing her emotion, Leo thanked her director, fellow cast members and even “the residents of Plattsburg, New York,” which the movie was made. She shouted as she left the stage, “Hooray independents.”
Backstage, Leo predicted that Meryl Street or Kate Winslet would win the best actress Oscar, for which she is also a nominee. She said that was alright because the attention to her work in “Frozen River” had already translated into a career boost.
When asked what advice she might have for other independent filmmakers, Leo said to first write a great script “ready to leap from the page to the screen” and then “When you start shopping it around remain true to your film” because “that’s the only way your film has a shot in hell of getting seen…Truth, honesty, those are the things that matter and count.”
The afternoon had started strongly for the movie “Milk,” about the life and death of gay politician Harvey Milk. It took best supporting actor honors for James Franco and then the best screenplay award for Dustin Lance Black, who also took the top prize for original screenplay at the recent Writer’s Guild Awards, before losing the cinematography and best actor honors to “The Wrestler.”
Franco said backstage that he did extensive research into his role as Milk’s lover. “It was hard to find a lot of documentation (about the character)…so I depended on the people who really knew him to get a grasp of his life.”
Black, when asked about the backlash to Proposition 8 in California, said that it was time for gays to “introduce themselves to the community” because by showing themselves they can make “things change.”
Spanish star Penelope Cruz said she was surprised when she won as best supporting actress for “Vicky Cristina Barcelona,” because she never expects to win. “I didn’t expect this,” Cruz said. “I go to all awards like this, not expecting anything, so it’s always a surprise when I win.”
Even then, she said it isn’t easy for her to accept. “I get very terrified about going up there,” said Cruz, “but of course you go up there.”

In her acceptance, Cruz told a story about director Woody Allen leaving the set on the day she was shooting a scene in which she made out with Scarlett Johansson because he had to see a doctor about a discoloration that appeared on his skin. Allen later was honored for his screenplay with a Spirit Award, but the notoriously reclusive director was not on hand to accept.
The MC for the program was Steve Coogan, a British actor, writer and comic who is little known on this side of the Atlantic except, as Ben Stiller said in a taped introduction, as a minor featured player in several movies, including “Tropic Thunder.” Coogan said that movies were a shared experience and “Today we all share the experience of not having seen most of the movies.”
That didn’t matter to the audience, who were in the spirit of the afternoon. As Film Independent’s Dawn Hudson put it: “These films are not profit driven, they’re artist driven.”
Money does matter however. Although the majority of nominated movies were ultra low budget by Hollywood standards, some pushed the upper limits of the supposed budget limit on entrants of $20 million. The movie “Synecdoche, New York” for instance was reported to have cost closer to $22 million. “This is an independent movie in the sense we are doing something different,” said director Charlie Kaufman, a veteran Hollywood writer honored as director of his first feature. “It doesn’t adhere to any formula.”
“Synecdoche, New York,” which also won the second annual Robert Altman Award, did qualify as a movie that wasn’t profit driven. Released last October, its domestic box office take was barely $3 million.
Coogan’s humor was mild mannered compared to other Spirit Award MC’s of the past such as John Waters, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Rainn Wilson, “The Office” star who on Saturday did a bit satirizing Rourke in “The Wrestler,” wearing a yellow blonde wig.
Rourke apparently didn’t like Rainn’s portrayal. During his acceptance speech he said, “That little blonde dude that did that thing, I’m going to beat your ass when I get out of here.”
The crowd laughed at the threat, as did Wilson who later posed for pictures with Rourke backstage, showing that it was all just a big joke.
Along with Rourke, Dustin Lance Black, Cruz and Leo, the other Oscar nominee that won a Spirit Award was the French film “The Class,” which took the top prize at Cannes last May and is up for best foreign language film at the Academy Awards. Unfortunately for all of them, winning a Spirit Award is not only no guarantee of success at the Oscars, but may even be an opposite omen. More often than not the winners at the Spirit Awards are also-rans at the Oscars. Whether that is the case this year is yet to be seen.
List of winners:
Supporting male
James Franco “Milk”
First screenplay
Dustin Lance Black, “Milk”
First feature
Charlie Kaufman’s “Synecdoche, New York”
Supporting female
Penelope Cruz, “Vicky Cristina Barcelona”
John Cassavetes Award given to the best feature made for less than $500,000
Alex Holdridge’s “In Search of a Midnight Kiss”
Documentary
James Marsh’s “Man on Wire”
Female lead
Melissa Leo, “Frozen River”
Acura Someone to Watch Award
Lynn Shelton, “My Effortless Brilliance”
Piaget Producers Award
Heather Rae, “Frozen River”
Lacoste Truer Than Fiction Award
Margaret Brown, “The Order of Myths”
Screenplay
Woody Allen, “Vicky Cristina Barcelona”
Foreign film
Laurent Cantet’s “The Class”
Cinematographer
Maryse Alberti, “The Wrestler”
Robert Altman Award, “Synecdoche, New York”
Male lead
Mickey Rourke, “The Wrestler”
Director
Tom McCarthy, “The Visitor”
Picture
“The Wrestler,” producers Darren Aronofsky, Scott Franklin