The 40th Film Independent Spirit Awards took place on Saturday afternoon, February 22, 2025, in a tent on the Santa Monica beach. Oscar®-winning actress Emma Stone (Poor Things, La La Land), who was in attendance, had every reason to celebrate.

In an admirable example of giving back, Stone produced no less than four of the nominated films: Julio Torres’ Problemista and Fantasmas, Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow, and Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain. In what must have been a widely felt sentiment, Eisenberg thanked Stone for being his “fairy godmother” when accepting the award for Best Screenplay.

The Spirit Awards recognize films made on budgets of no more than $30 million. This year’s ceremony, which was held in the wake of the devastating LA wildfires, was a truly inspiring, heartfelt celebration of independent artists and their supporters. The awards show was streamed live and remains available for viewing.

You can find the list of winners on Film Independent’s website, but here is some of the exciting news from the 2025 Spirit Awards!

The Host

For the second year in a row, the Spirit Awards were hosted by Emmy®-nominated comedian Aidy Bryant. She is best known as a cast member on Saturday Night Live from 2012-2022, where she played roles like Tonker Bell, the tawdry spawn of a pixie and a housefly.

As Bryant observed in her opening monologue, “It has been a great year for film, and a bad year for human life.” Later, she proposed making history with “Indie Cinema’s Longest Dramatic Look,” a bit involving Molly Shannon (Superstar), Oscar® winner Michelle Yeoh (Everything Everywhere All at Once), and Emma Stone. Finally, Bryant shared her vision for new Spirit Awards like “Best Dong, Crack and Mind,” an honor she promptly conferred upon Salvadoran American comedian Julio Torres.

Fans of Bryant’s wonderfully quirky humor can look forward to seeing her next on the second season of Francesca Delbanco and Nicholas Stoller’s Platonic, starring Rose Byrne and Seth Rogen.

In Memoriam

As Film Independent previously announced, its President, Josh Welsh, passed away on December 31, 2024. Welsh had worked at Film Independent for over 20 years and served as President since 2012. Acting President Brenda Robinson praised him as “a visionary of the type that comes along once in a lifetime.”

When presenting the John Cassavetes Award, for a feature film with a budget under $1 million, Patti LuPone and Natasha Lyonne remembered Cassavetes’ wife, honorary Oscar®-winning actress Gena Rowlands (The Notebook). Rowlands passed away in August 2024. As Lyonne remarked, she was an “undisputed heavyweight champion of the artform [cinema].”

Spirit Award Winners

Spirit Awards are given in 14 categories for film and six for television. Each genre division has at least one award especially designed to recognize and nurture new talent. There are also three Emerging Filmmakers Awards, which go to a producer, director, and documentarian.

Films winning multiple awards were Sean Baker’s Anora, Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain, and Sean Wang’s Dìdi. The only television show to win multiple awards was Richard Gadd’s Baby Reindeer; remarkably, it swept half of the awards in the category.

Film

The biggest winner of the afternoon was Anora, which previously earned the Palme d’Or at Cannes. In this comedy, a wealthy Russian couple freaks out after their son’s Vegas wedding to his 21st-century Cinderella, a Brooklyn sex worker named Ani. The film won awards for Best Feature, Director (Sean Baker), and Lead Performance (Mikey Madison).

Also faring quite well in the competition was A Real Pain by writer-director Jesse Eisenberg, who plays a tightly wound character named David. His cousin Benjy (Kieran Culkin) drives David crazy – but also helps him to heal – as they travel to the childhood home of their recently deceased grandmother, a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor. The collaboration brought Eisenberg Best Screenplay and Culkin Best Supporting Performance.

Two awards for new talent went to Sean Wang, writer-director of Dìdi, which won a Sundance Special Jury Award for its ensemble cast of Izaac Wang, Joan Chen, and other excellent performers. As Sean Wang noted in an acceptance speech, the film broke ground as a coming-of-age story with a Taiwanese American protagonist. Dìdi won the awards for First Feature and First Screenplay.

Television

Natasha Rothwell’s How to Die Alone won the television award for ensemble cast, but in something of a coup, Baby Reindeer brought a similar honor on itself by sweeping the acting awards for television. Baby Reindeer chronicles the persecution of Scottish comedian Donny Gunn (Richard Gadd) and his trans girlfriend, Teri (Nava Mau), by Martha Scott (Jessica Gunning), a delusional stalker whom Donny unfortunately encourages or incites on several occasions. For their outstanding work, Gadd, Mau, and Gunning won the awards for Lead, Supporting, and Breakthrough Performances, respectively.

The award for a New Scripted Series went to Rachel Kondo and Justin Marks’ Shōgun, based on the 1975 novel by James Clavell. In the series, shipwrecked English sailor John Blackthorne (Cosmo Jarvis) unwittingly catalyzes a civil war among seventeenth-century Japanese warlords, including the formidable Yoshii Toranaga (Hiroyuki Sanada). We featured Shōgun among the shows and other art we were grateful for in our 2024 Thanksgiving roundup.

Finally, the award for a New Non-Scripted or Documentary Series went to Justin Simien’s Hollywood Black, based on historian Donald Bogle’s book of the same name. The four-part docuseries illuminates untold contributions of Black creatives to the U.S. entertainment industry.

Thank you, Film Independent!

Quite rightly, award recipients thanked Film Independent, a sentiment we would echo and magnify. Funds raised by the Spirit Awards enable Film Independent to support indie filmmakers year-round through an array of educational programs and grants. Audiences would not be able to enjoy such a vibrant selection of indie films without its work.

Similarly, we’re grateful to Hollywood stars like Emma Stone who continue to foster the careers of new filmmakers or visionary auteurs working outside the commercial mainstream. While remembering the producers, we must also thank the distributors: The biggest winners of the afternoon were brought to audiences by Neon (Anora), Searchlight (A Real Pain), and Focus Features (Dìdi). But many other wonderful distributors, too many to list here, are working nonstop to keep indie cinema alive.

In addition to congratulating all the Spirit Award winners, please join us in thanking Film Independent and all the supporters of indie artists. We can’t wait for next year’s nominees!