The Independent Spirit Awards Winners Reflected a Scaled-Down Show

The Film Independent Spirit Awards swapped a massive beach tent for a concert hall and its big winners were more indie darlings than Oscar frontrunners.

If you tuned into the IMDb YouTube page to catch the 2026 Film Independent Spirit Awards, the vibe felt different this year.

Blame the 2028 Summer Olympics. Although we are in deep on watching Curling, Figure Skating, and Skeleton races in Milan, Italy, the city of Los Angeles is already preparing to host the summer games — and that impeded on Film Independent’s ability to host its show on the beaches of Santa Monica.

Instead, the awards ceremony was hosted steps away from the Walk of Fame, at the Hollywood Palladium — a concert venue that recently hosted Demi Lovato and Chance the Rapper.

The shift also represented a more subdued awards show. A “Saturday Night Live” alumni hosted — as it did with Aidy Bryant — this year the event hired Ego Nwodim fresh off her NBC exit. She played off her standup persona, Miss Eggy. It garnered her a lot of laughs in her final season; here, the character did not play as well.

Kudos to the ceremony for finishing exactly on time, but no-shows were one reason Film Independent pulled it off. Emmy winners Stephen Graham and Owen Cooper also won at the Spirits; they were absent, despite the Netflix limited series being the big winner among the TV categories. Also Best Supporting Performance winner Naomi Ackie (“Sorry, Baby”) had also missed out.

Every once in a while, the Film Independent Spirit Awards has been an Oscar precursor. Last year “Anora” won Best Feature Film, Best Director, and Best Lead Performance. Two years prior, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” took the same trifecta. Both films would go on to win similar categories at the Oscars.

This year’s winner of Best Feature Film and Best Director, Clint Bentley’s “Train Dreams,” can’t follow suit at the Oscars (the Netflix film was nominated for Best Picture, but not Best Director). The Gotham Awards, which long had similar nominees to the Film Independent Spirit Awards until it got rid of its budget cap, was more on the nose in giving its Best Film award to “One Battle After Another.”

The Oscar voting trend that the 2026 Film Independent Spirit Awards did hit is the embrace of Brazilian filmmakers. Not only did Best International Feature frontrunner “The Secret Agent” win the Indie Spirit award for Best International Feature Film, but Adolpho Veloso, the first Brazilian nominee for the Best Cinematography Oscar, also won the Indie Spirit award for Best Cinematography for his work on “Train Dreams.”

Worth noting too that “Song Sung Blue” star Kate Hudson handed her fellow Best Actress nominee Rose Byrne the Independent Spirit Award for Best Lead Performance. That may have served as the best indication that the event could still maintain the vibes that let them bring together film and TV contenders behind all backgrounds and budgets.