Awards Season Continues With Gotham Independent Film Award Nominations

Earlier this week, the 2013 Gotham Independent Film Awards nominations were announced.

The film that many are already predicting to win an Oscar, 12 Years A Slave, was nominated for the most awards. The film received nominations for best feature, best actor (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and best breakthrough actor (Lupita Nyong’o).

According to Scott Feinberg in an article by The Hollywood Reporter, "an unusually large contingent of this year's most serious Oscar contenders received Gotham Independent Film Award nominations Thursday morning."

A community of 230,000 independent film fans from across the globe will vote for the award winners. Online voting will began Oct 24, and nominees with be announced on Nov. 8.

To be eligible for a Gotham Independent Film Award, a U.S. film has to have won an audience award at one of the top 50 U.S. or Canadian film festivals between December 2012 and October 2013.

Many film reporters and critics are saying that the award winners probably don't indicate who will win the Oscars. In his report for Deadline, Mike Fleming Jr wrote, "This is the first of the many upcoming awards shows, and because of the Gotham’s indie bent, the awards rarely reflect how the Oscars turn out. I always found that to be the most charming thing about them."

Though some are skeptical over whether the Gotham awards predict Oscar winners, the recent Hollywood Film Awards was the first awards show of the 2013 film awards season, an important indicator for who will take the Oscar awards in the same category. Quentin Tarantino, last year’s Hollywood Screenwriters Award winner, went on to win the best original screenplay Oscar for Django Unchained. Check out the ScreenCraft post, Hollywood Screenwriters Award Winners Are In The Oscar Race For ‘Before Midnight’