An Inconvenient Award Show

WHILE YOU'RE BUSY DEFENDING your nonprofit status and your executive director's quarter million dollar salary, Santa Monica Oscars Independent Spirit Awards, here's how some of us on the other side of LA will be avoiding the real Academy Awards tonight: "Sunday night at the Bigfoot Lodge on Los Feliz Boulevard [in Atwater Village] Spencer Lee, 'the Movie Guy,' breaks open his massive collection of 8- and 16-millimeter films and plays them all night, starting at 10. "'He has everything from people's private porn movies - nothing too bad - to old Bill Cosby footage,' manager Mark DeSalvo says. 'It's also bingo night here... But this is almost a neighborhood bar on Sundays. That's as Oscar night as it's going to get.'" Read more about Oscar avoidance in this article from yesterday's LA Times. This is the same paper, of course, that fails to disclaim in its other article how it sponsors (and perhaps sees a tax benefit from?) the Los Angeles Film Festival, run by the same umbrella nonprofit as the Independent Spirit Awards. I suppose if the LA Times donates ad space to LAFF, then Film Independent can well afford to drop $265,000 a year on a Harvard grad.