Another weekend, another slate of awards ceremonies to attend, cover, and predict. This weekend brings the 2025 Film Independent Spirit Awards to Santa Monica on Saturday. Then, we have the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Awards in downtown Los Angeles on Sunday, which will also be broadcast live on Netflix.
On this week’s episode of “Screen Talk,” Anne Thompson and Ryan Lattanzio preview the Spirit Awards and predict who will win each of the major categories, with “Anora” and beloved indie filmmaker Sean Baker poised to take home a few prizes. Will Demi Moore or Mikey Madison win the Best Lead Performance prize? It’s a similarly anxious race for the Best Actress Oscar, where one of these women will take home the gold statue.
Meanwhile, we also go through the Oscar-nominated short films this year in the Live Action, Documentary, and Animated categories. Anne and Ryan disagree on films, including Bill Morrison’s bodycam documentary “Incident,” about the police killing of a Black Chicago barber in 2018, and Nina Gantz’s animated “Wander to Wonder,” which ingeniously shoots in stop-motion including inside a pickle jar. In the animation category, look to either the cute French farce “Yuck!” or Iran’s “In the Shadow of the Cypress,” whose filmmaking team of Shirin Sohani and Hossein Molayemi have not been able to secure visas to attend the awards, to win. In the documentary category, keep an eye on Paramount+’s “I Am Ready, Warden,” a documentary about the last days of a death row inmate who was executed in 2022.
The one we both admire is Nebojša Slijepčević’s Croatian film “The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent,” set during an episode of the Bosnian massacre in 1993 on a train, and beautifully shot. The filmmaker already has a feature lined up, as this film certainly proves his skills as a director. This should take home the Live Action short film prize. But there’s also the immigration drama “A Lien,” which speaks its emotions in franker (and timely) terms as a story of a family asunder by ICE.
Listen to the episode below.
Screen Talk is produced by Azwan Badruzaman and available on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and Spotify, and hosted by Megaphone. Browse previous episodes here, subscribe here, and be sure to let us know if you’d like to hear the hosts address specific issues in upcoming editions of Screen Talk.
