Gandalf for gay rights! Were you one of the zillions who caught out-of-the-closet Ian McKellen’s knee being fondled by his Fabio-looking boy toy in the audience at the Academy Awards? Nothing as thrilling happened at the inert, impossibly safe Independent Spirit Awards, which were held the day before the Oscars in a tent on Santa Monica Beach and broadcast on the Bravo Channel.

This supposed "anti-Oscar" festivity was anything but, starting with the selection of the egregious Amélie for Best Foreign Film, a work so shamefully manipulative that it was actually passed over for an Oscar. And so it went. The indie winners in practically every category were chosen for the same reasons as their Academy Award counterparts: they got respectable reviews and (more important?) performed at the box office. Memento, a runaway hit, won for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Supporting Actress. Honors were also accorded to the successful In the Bedroom (Best Actor, Best Actress) and Ghost World (Best First Screenplay, Best Supporting Actor).

Nothing wrong with these films. But the Spirit Awards shut out 2001’s two visionary indies: Richard Linklater’s Waking Life and Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko. And unlike Denzel Washington, Will Smith, and Halle Berry, the half-dozen African-Americans up for Spirit awards (including Kerry Washington for the Boston-made Lift) didn’t have a chance. None of the films for which they were nominated (Lift, Stranger Inside, Things Behind the Sun) made a dime.

FOR MUCH OF THE ENTERTAINING 1976 FILM The Front — which is playing this Monday, April 8, in a new 35mm print at the Brattle, where it will be introduced by Boston Herald film critic James Verniere — we are given a genuinely different Woody Allen. Goodbye to his shrill, manic, bundle of hip cultural jokes and incessant one-liners. Allen’s Howard Prince is complacent, slow-moving, and know-nothing, his non-intellectual conversation blank and nondescript. When he wanders into a bookstore, it’s to procure instant culture, as he buys up "two Hemingways and a Faulkner."

This Howard is a little worm and a big-time mooch, a slacker bar/restaurant cashier who is a bookie on the side, but so unsuccessful that he’s always borrowing from his garment-industry brother. (Is there any other movie in which Allen has a sibling?) Amoral to the core, he doesn’t hesitate when made a lucrative offer by a television-writer friend (Michael Murphy) who’s been blacklisted (it’s the McCarthyite 1950s) for his leftist politics. Will Howard serve as a "front" and pretend to write his friend’s teleplays? He collects 10 percent for each script he claims to have penned; he gets the glory and even a girl. It’s such a grand business that whorish Howard takes on a couple more clients. Three blacklisted writers = lots of moolah.

Many of The Front’s principals were themselves blacklisted in the awful Eisenhower ’50s, including screenwriter Walter Bernstein, director Martin Ritt, and performers Herschel Bernardi and Zero Mostel (both Broadway Tevyes in Fiddler on the Roof). You shouldn’t pass up this chance to watch the late, great Mostel perform, as larger-than-life, mentally woozy TV comedian Hecky Brown (part Milton Berle, part Phil Silvers), who’s on the way down because of government hounding. His hotel-room suicide scene is the best since John Barrymore in 1932’s Grand Hotel.

I once talked to Hud/Norma Rae/Sounder filmmaker Ritt (1914-1990) about his own blacklisting. A Brooklyn Jew, he had graduated from the Group Theatre to a fabulous career in 1950s television as an actor, writer, and director. But, he said, "the shit hit the fan" because of his left-leaning theater activities, his directing of trade-union shows, and his signing petitions to recognize Red China.

Suddenly, his contract with CBS was not renewed. He returned to teaching at the Actors Studio, and his wife, Adelle, sold advertisements in the Yellow Pages. "An amazing woman," he said. "Without her, God knows." One day, Ritt was offered an out. In an office at CBS, he was told, "Marty, television is growing up. We need a guy like you." All he was asked to do was to take out a full-page ad in the Times or Variety saying, "I was a dupe. I was taken in. And at various [leftist] meetings I went to, so-and-so was there." His response: "They didn’t care who I named. It could be dead people. They were only interested in thought control, in breaking my spirits. I may not have been the most judicious political thinker, but I understood that. I said, more or less, ‘Fuck you! I’ve gotten along without you, and I’ll manage.’ And I did manage."

Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary@world.std.com.