On The Scene: Sundance Awards

With each of its three awards on Saturday night at the Sundance Film Festival awards ceremony, the cheers for "Push: Based On The Novel By Sapphire" grew louder and louder. By the time the film was announced as the winner of the final award of the evening, the Grand Jury Prize in the festival's U.S. Dramatic competition, the room burst with excitement.

"I'm drunk," said director Lee Daniels, adding that he downed a few drinks after the film's previous win. Fighting back tears, he continued his heartfelt remarks by thanking the festival's programmers for screening the film -- made by and starring African Americans telling the story of inner-city struggle. "I really didn't know that white people would understand the world, you showed me this is universal."

After the ceremony, Daniels said he had tried to avoid any reports of the film's growing buzz during the festival. "My friends all know never to send me reviews, bad or good. So don't you know that my mother sends me a review."

When it was announced during the ceremony that a Special Jury Prize for acting was being given to the absent Mo'Nique for her role in "Push," Daniels escorted the film's young star, Gabourey Sidibe, to the stage. After a few brief thank yous, Sidibe looked around and asked, "Is that good?"

Director Ondi Timoner won the Grand Jury Prize for U.S. Documentary for the second time when she picked up the award for "We Live In Public." She had previously won in 2004 for "Dig!"

"The first one, I didn't even know there was an awards ceremony," she said after the ceremony as she stood with her mother near the venue's entrance, just off the phone to tell her father the news.

"We Live In Public" tells the story of Internet pioneer Josh Harris, among the first to allow every aspect of his real life to also exist online.

"We all knew the message this film delivers, the questions that it raised, were absolutely of now," Timoner said of the reaction to the film. "Now is the tipping point between the virtual world and the physical world, where all of us are spending more time online, forming relationships more thoroughly  than we are in our physical lives. And that has its price to pay."

The audience award for documentary went to "The Cove," about the environmental impact on a Japanese fishing village. After producer Fisher Stevens invited the film's main subject, activist Rick O'Barry, to the stage, O'Barry made a direct plea to Japanese broadcaster NHK -- which had earlier in the evening bestowed filmmaker grants -- to show the film in Japan.

The biggest surprise of the evening, met by some palpable dismay in the audience, was likely the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award going to Nicholas Jasenovec and Charlyne Yi for "Paper Heart." The film is a hybrid of documentary and improvised comedy, and while accepting the award Jasenovec said there were only five pages of written material.

"The writing isn't necessarily written, it was a different form," Yi said after the ceremony of the film's unusual construction. "I feel like we put so much work into trying to blend documentary with fiction. I think we did put in the effort, it was just a different form of effort."

Jury member Mike White defended the decision when he said, "We really liked 'Paper Heart,' and it was hard to find the right category for it. And it felt weirdest to put it in the screenplay category, but we said that's kind of punk rock, which is the spirit of the movie and the spirit of Sundance."

There were at least half a dozen references to President Obama during the ceremony, from an audio excerpt of his inauguration speech used during an opening clip montage, to a T-shirt worn by presenter Joseph Gordon-Levitt, to a badge held up by the Sundance Institute's executive director, Ken Brecher, which declared Obama honorary head of the festival's juries.

"What we wanted to do was make sure it didn't actually take over," Geoff Gilmore, director of the festival, said about the Obama factor throughout the festival .  It became a subtext, which is what it should be in this thing. There was going to be so much visibility for what happened, the historic day, that Tuesday, and I think so many people here feel so strongly about it that we knew it was going to be a part of what we talked about."

As for the fact that "Push" happened to win during this Obama-accented festival, Gilmore noted, "It couldn't have been more choice. And yet it's so unanticipated because you don't predict this stuff. You literally watch and see what happens."

--Mark Olsen