The Good Fight in a Slippery Season

Or so it seemed until the following evening, when—despite its three nominations—Anora was shut out at the Screen Actors Guild Awards. No matter. Throughout this entire slippery awards season, every contender—even Anora, with its honors from the producers’ and directors’ guilds—has had a bumpy ride. Adrien Brody, who plays an architect and Holocaust survivor pursuing his dream in America in Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, was on a winning streak—a BAFTA, a Golden Globe, accolades from several critics’ groups—until Timothée Chalamet broke it by winning Best Actor at the SAG Awards for his portrayal of a young Bob Dylan in James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown.

Edward Berger’s Vatican drama Conclave seemed to have drifted from memory until the BAFTAs blew wind back into its sails, and on Sunday, the cast led by Ralph Fiennes won the SAG Award for Best Ensemble. Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez, an early favorite, has been taking hits from all sides, but Zoe Saldaña, who plays a high-flying Mexico City lawyer, has proven to be unsinkable. She’s just added a SAG Award for her supporting performance to a shelf already gleaming with a BAFTA and a Golden Globe.

Fill a room with actors and you can expect speeches that soar, touch, or tickle. Accepting her SAG Award for her leading performance as a dimming star in Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, Demi Moore, who landed her first film and television roles in 1981, extended the victory lap that began at the top of the year with a Golden Globe. Jane Fonda, now eighty-seven, hammered home the evening’s themes of empathy and community when she accepted her SAG Lifetime Achievement Award. “A whole lot of people are going to be really hurt by what is happening, what is coming our way,” said Fonda. “This is big-time serious, folks, so let’s be brave.”

The room—or rather, the tent—on the Santa Monica beach where the Spirit Awards are presented is packed with a different sort of crowd. Everyone present has worked on films made for thirty million dollars or less, and as Sean Baker emphasized, “I’ve been in this room with every one of my films, starting with Take Out.” That’s a twenty-year relationship with Film Independent; this is his extended family.

As producer and Filmmaker editor Scott Macaulay points out, Baker “addressed the issue of director fees and sustainability, a topic injected into the conversation last week when Brady Corbet spoke on the WTF podcast about having made ‘no money’ on The Brutalist.” Macaulay offers a brief but helpful primer on the nuts and bolts of upfront fees and back ends in an editor’s note that explains how Corbet and his partner Mona Fastvold can still get by, but as Corbet recently told Michael Almereyda, “making something requires a level of obsession that always borders on the unhealthy. You are, in fact, putting all of your relationships second. It’s the only way that these things tend to get off the ground.”

“I personally do not have children,” said Baker on Saturday, “but I know for a fact that if I did, I would not be able to make the movies that I make.” He called on the community to band together, because in the current environment, “we have to demand” that upfront fees be raised. If that doesn’t happen, “indie films will simply become calling card films, and I know that’s not what I signed up for,” said Baker. “And we can work together . . . to make indie film sustainable for creatives and keep indie film alive. This is for all the indie film lifers who are holding on and fighting the good fight.”