The Independent Spirit award is supposed to salute what past ceremony host Samuel L. Jackson once called "the strange, the weird, the eclectic, the visionary, the new blood." Ideally, its purpose is to help those low-profile quality films that could use a boost so that someday, maybe, the filmmakers and performers could compete in the big league of the Oscars.
And back when the Spirits took flight, they tried hard to keep to that mission. Indeed, its first best-picture winner in 1985, "After Hours," wasn't nominated for a single Oscar. But then "Platoon" won best pic at both the Spirits and the Oscars the next year. From then on, the Spirits focused more and more on seemingly academy-friendly films, with a corresponding increase in its own profile. While 1987 best-pic winner "River's Edge" was snubbed at the Oscars, other early champs made it into Oscar categories like screenplay ("sex, lies and videotape,
tomoneil

Read the full article on goldderby.latimes.com