Reverend's Report from Outfest: Awards Night

Drag queen Momma, wannabe drag queen Janice Dickinson, and out actors T.R. Knight, Craig Chester and Rex Lee were on hand in Los Angeles last night to present the "Outie" Awards at the official conclusion of Outfest 2008. Here are the winners:

Audience Awards:

• Outstanding US Dramatic Feature: Hamlet 2 (directed and co-written by Andrew Fleming)
• Outstanding Documentary Feature: A Place to Live (directed by Carolyn Coal)
• Outstanding First US Dramatic Feature: Watercolors (directed and written by David Oliveras)
• Outstanding Soundtrack: Hamlet 2 (Rock Me, Sexy Jesus!)
• Outstanding Narrative Short: I'm Jin-Young (directed by Lee Sung Eun)
• Outstanding Documentary Short: La Corona (directed by Amanda Micheli and Isabel Vega)

Grand Jury Awards:

• "Heineken Red Star" Award: Were the World Mine (directed by Thomas Gustafson) -- See review below.
• Outstanding International Documentary Feature: Sex Positive (directed by Daryl Wein)
• Outstanding International Dramatic Feature: XXY (directed and written by Lucia Puenzo)
• Outstanding Narrative Short Film: Countertransference (directed by Madeleine Olnek)
• Outstanding Documentary Short Film: La Corona
• Outstanding Actor in a Feature Film: Tye Olson in Watercolors
• Outstanding Actress in a Feature Film: Nicole Bilderback in The New Twenty
• Outstanding Screenwriting: James Bolton for Dream Boy

Special Programming Awards:

• For Freedom: Football Under Cover (directed by Ayat Najafi and David Assmann)
• For Artistic Achievement: Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell (directed by Matt Wolf)
• For Emerging Talent: Dave O'Brien, director of Equality U

The awards presentation was immediately followed by the Los Angeles premiere of Were the World Mine. This gay musical riff on all things Shakespeare, but especially A Midsummer Night's Dream, is imperfect but enjoyable. Director/co-writer (with Cory James Krueckeberg) Gustafson actually expanded his previous short film Fairies into this feature. I think the short is the better movie, as the feature becomes heavy-handed in its literalism. But Gustafson assembled a talented young cast -- including Tanner Cohen and Robin Williams' daughter, Zelda Williams -- for the feature and, with a larger budget to play with, made it visually ravishing. (Watch the trailer here.)

Outfest will conclude tonight with the Los Angeles premiere of Tru Loved, a new film by Stewart Wade (Coffee Date). It's a hot ticket and ... I couldn't get one, so this concludes my day-by-day coverage of Outfest 2008. However, many more movies and filmmakers made an impression during the fest than one can adequately survey in a mere week and a half. I'll continue to post reviews and interviews in the weeks and months to come.

Review by Rev. Chris Carpenter, resident film critic of Movie Dearest and the Orange County and Long Beach Blade.