Before Oscars, ‘Everything Everywhere’ Sweeps Spirit Awards

Jamie Lee Curtis, Michelle Yeoh, Dan Kwan, Stephanie Hsu, Jonathan Wang, Daniel Scheinert and Ke Huy Quan winners of the Best Feature award for "Everything Everywhere All at Once" pose in the press room during the 2023 Film Independent Spirit Awards in Santa Monica, US, March 4, 2023. (Reuters)
Jamie Lee Curtis, Michelle Yeoh, Dan Kwan, Stephanie Hsu, Jonathan Wang, Daniel Scheinert and Ke Huy Quan winners of the Best Feature award for "Everything Everywhere All at Once" pose in the press room during the 2023 Film Independent Spirit Awards in Santa Monica, US, March 4, 2023. (Reuters)
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Before Oscars, ‘Everything Everywhere’ Sweeps Spirit Awards

Jamie Lee Curtis, Michelle Yeoh, Dan Kwan, Stephanie Hsu, Jonathan Wang, Daniel Scheinert and Ke Huy Quan winners of the Best Feature award for "Everything Everywhere All at Once" pose in the press room during the 2023 Film Independent Spirit Awards in Santa Monica, US, March 4, 2023. (Reuters)
Jamie Lee Curtis, Michelle Yeoh, Dan Kwan, Stephanie Hsu, Jonathan Wang, Daniel Scheinert and Ke Huy Quan winners of the Best Feature award for "Everything Everywhere All at Once" pose in the press room during the 2023 Film Independent Spirit Awards in Santa Monica, US, March 4, 2023. (Reuters)

"Everything Everywhere All At Once" continued its awards sweep at the Film Independent Spirit Awards on its path to the Oscars next weekend. The multiverse-hopping adventure collected awards for best picture, directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, actors Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan and Stephanie Hsu, screenplay and editing.

"Thank you to everyone who makes crazy, weird independent movies," Scheinert said.

Awards were handed out Saturday afternoon in a tent on the beach in Santa Monica, Calif., and the show was streamed live on YouTube and Twitter.

First-time Spirit Awards host Hasan Minhaj opened the show saying, "Of all the awards shows, this is by far, one of them."

Minhaj went hard on everything, from the entertainment trade website Deadline ("At this point, Deadline is half gossip, half Ezra Miller crime tracker," he said) to the show’s lack of a broadcast partner.

"The Independent Film Channel did not want the Independent Film Awards," he said, noting that the channel chose to show the poorly reviewed Will Ferrell movie "Semi-Pro" instead.

"Awards shows are dead," he added. "My 2-year-old watches slime videos with more viewers than the Oscars."

The first prize of the afternoon went to Quan for best supporting actor for "Everything Everywhere All At Once," which his co-star Jamie Lee Curtis was also nominated for. This is the first year the Spirit Awards embraced gender neutral acting awards – both lead and supporting performance categories had 10 nominees. Quan, who is expected to win the supporting actor Oscar next week, chose to devote his speech to many of the crew who worked on the film, from the stunt coordinators to the production assistants.

Hsu later collected the prize for best breakthrough performance for the film.

"This is my first ever individual award and it feels incredibly appropriate that it’s in this room. I feel so honored" she said. "I really want to thank the Daniels so much. Thank you so much for finding me and believing in my art and seeing me and championing me."

Laura Poitras’s "All the Beauty and the Bloodshed" won best documentary. The film looks at the life of photographer and activist Nan Goldin.

"It would take me the entire day to fully express my gratitude to Nan for her collaboration and for her trust," Poitras said. "She’s taught me so many things in making this film, most importantly the role of art and artists to change not only society but how we understand the world we live in."

"Women Talking" was previously announced as winner of the Robert Altman Award, celebrating director Sarah Polley, casting directors John Buchan and Jason Knight, and the ensemble cast including Jessie Buckley, Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Ben Whishaw and Frances McDormand.

"It’s so fitting the way that you’re being recognized for the beautiful, supportive, loving ensemble that you are," Polley said.

She also called her film "Women Are Talking" in a nod to Mark Wahlberg’s slip-up at the Screen Actors Guild Award s last week.

"Sorry, Marky Mark just gets in my head," she said.

Apple TV+’s "Pachinko" got the corresponding award on the television side.

Nathan Fielder had the crowd laughing accepting his award for non-scripted series for his HBO show "The Rehearsal" and detailing the contents of the lunch boxes at everyone’s seats.

"The bean salad was great," he said. "There were a few grapes also. Delicious. They weren’t rotten. None were rotten."

Looking down at his award, he said, "I guess they’ll add the name to it later?"

"Nanny" director Nikyatu Jusu won the Someone to Watch award.

"Thank God Charlotte Wells was not in this category because all year ‘Aftersun’ has been whooping my ass," Jusu said.

"Aftersun" did win best first feature later in the afternoon.

"Here’s to the second feature," Wells said.

Other winners included "Joyland" (best international film), "The Bear" (new scripted series and supporting actor Ayo Edebiri), "The Cathedral" (The John Cassavetes Award), John Patton Ford (first screenplay for "Emily the Criminal") and "Tár" cinematographer Florian Hoffmeister.

Winners are voted on by members of the non-profit organization Film Independent. The budget cap for eligible films was recently raised from $22.5 million to $30 million.

Kwan closed the show with some words of inspiration to dream big.

"We are in the middle of an identity crisis, the industry at large is confused as to what’s happening next and it’s really scary especially for the independent world, but I want to offer up a reframe: This is an opportunity," Kwan said.

"When things are shaking and it gets turbulent and cracks form in the foundation, that’s the best time to plant seeds. It is our job not just to adapt to the future but also to actively dream up what kind of future we want to rewrite and what kind of future we want to be working and living in," Kwan continued. "I urge us all to dream really big. What we do here is going to flow upstream to the rest of the industry."



Hulu's 'Good American Family' with Ellen Pompeo Scrambles a Wild True-Crime Case

 This image released by Disney shows Ellen Pompeo in a scene from "Good American Family." (Ser Baffo/Disney via AP)
This image released by Disney shows Ellen Pompeo in a scene from "Good American Family." (Ser Baffo/Disney via AP)
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Hulu's 'Good American Family' with Ellen Pompeo Scrambles a Wild True-Crime Case

 This image released by Disney shows Ellen Pompeo in a scene from "Good American Family." (Ser Baffo/Disney via AP)
This image released by Disney shows Ellen Pompeo in a scene from "Good American Family." (Ser Baffo/Disney via AP)

If Ellen Pompeo was going to find a new role after 20 years as a series regular on ABC's "Grey's Anatomy," it had to be good. She thinks she found it as a supermom whose world collapses in Hulu's "Good American Family."

"I was looking for a real creative challenge. I think this was an opportunity for me to completely disappear into a role,″ she says. "Characters like this don't come along all that often."

"Good American Family" fictionalizes the true story of Natalia Grace, a Ukrainian-born orphan with dwarfism, adopted as a child by an American family who soon accuse her of being a troubled adult masquerading as a child.

Pompeo plays the adoptive mother, whose character has become a sought-after speaker and author after raising a son with autism but now finds herself at her breaking point with Natalia, her marriage strained, in legal jeopardy and her reputation in tatters.

"We were taking all of this research that we had and amplifying certain moments or adjusting certain moments for kind of dramatic license," says creator and co-showrunner Katie Robbins, who also created "Sunny" and wrote for "The Affair."

"The thing that was important was to tell a propulsive, compulsively watchable thing. But, at the end of the day, the most important thing was to tell it in an emotionally authentic way to the people involved."

Over the years, the case has been the focus of several TV shows, podcasts and documentaries, including Investigation Discovery's documentary series "The Curious Case of Natalia Grace."

If viewers hope to get clarity on who the heroes are, they'll not get it with "Good American Family." It tells the story from multiple points of view, flashing forward and back, to create a complex family drama that also has elements of a thriller.

"You really have to pay attention to who's doing the telling," says Robbins. "Using perspective felt like an opportunity both to tell the story in kind of a fresh way, but also to allow us as storytellers to take the viewers on an experience that would help them confront their own biases in unexpected ways."

The series starts from the perspective of the adoptive parents — Mark Duplass plays the husband — who eventually turn on their new family member, but then shifts to Natalia (played by Imogen Faith Reid), slowly cracking any snap judgements the viewer may have had going into it.

"Everybody comes into the experience of this story with sort of a different way of looking at it," says co-showrunner and executive producer Sarah Sutherland. "It's sort of like a Rorschach test. I just thought it was super-fascinating to sit with the kind of uncomfortableness of that."

The eight episodes that begin debuting Wednesday seamlessly blend darkness and light, showing moments of family levity but also scenes of terror, as when Natalia approaches her parents' bed with a knife.

"In terms of the tone, I am a firm believer that life is a real genre blend," says Robbins. "The happiest moments in my life have been undercut often with tragedy, and the saddest moments I've often found myself finding something absurdly hilarious. So everything that I write, I try to let all live in that sort of tension because that's what it is to be a person."

At its core, "Good American Family" is about how we are raised and how that can echo through generations. We learn how Pompeo's character was treated by her mother and how Natalia wasn't always raised with familial love, priming them for a face-off.

"We're examining the ways in which one is parented trickles down and affects the way that one is a parent," says Robbins. "It changes the way that you perceive the world. And I think that it's a fascinating thing that runs through the arc of this series."

Pompeo sees an even larger point — how everyone these days has their own definitive version of events and sees things though their own lens.

"Even if you know you're wrong, it takes an extraordinary amount of humility to admit you're wrong. It's so much easier to just go with it, stick to the ego and say, 'I wasn't wrong,'" she says.

"We see that with what's happening in our country right now. People will fight to the death before they admit they were wrong. It doesn't matter what we see, right?" she adds.

"We're seeing things before our eyes, and people are saying something else, and we're choosing to believe what was said instead of what we're seeing. And that is the human condition."