There’s good news and bad news for the Independent Spirit Awards.

The broadcast last Saturday was a ratings disaster, with just 106,000 viewers. The key demo was just .03. Basically, almost no one watched them on IFC Channel. The show failed to make the top 150 cable shows on Saturday.

The good news is that this number was slightly up from last year’s 95,000. So that’s something.

Aubrey Plaza hosted the show. The winners included “If Beale Street Could Talk,” actors Glenn Close and Ethan Hawke. “Beale Street,” while an excellent film, hasn’t made much money and isn’t very high profile. Close and Hawke’s movies were also small. There wasn’t a huge audience for these films in the first place.

The Spirit Awards are down to just three sponsors. This year, Piaget dropped out.

Paul Schrader is one of the great filmmakers, writers, directors of all time. But he was nominated for his first Oscar this year for writing “First Reformed,” which he directed, starring Ethan Hawke.

Indie A24 distributed “First Reformed” and apparently they told Paul– who’s only written “Raging Bull,” “Taxi Driver,” written and directed his own “Affliction”– to keep off Facebook and hold his tongue until Oscar season was over.

It’s over. PS You must see “First Reformed” however you can– in theater, on Netflix, Amazon, etc. It’s so brilliant.

Paul posted this last night to Facebook. It’s a gem:

“Hello. Last fall, after I admitted that I’d like to work with Kevin Spacey, A24 requested that I stay off from FB until award season was over. It’s over and I’m out of FB jail. What happened while I was gone? (1) saw Phosphorescent and did a conversation with Matthew Houck (2) spent Christmas eve with Glenn Close and my family in Xmas costumes (3) Jeff Berg, my agent and friend of 45 years, gave me a reception in his Pacific Palisades home for the Hollywood 70s crowd (4) Dan Smith of Italian fashion firm Isaia gave me a fabulous tuxedo–thanks! (5) ran into Spike Lee, Alfonso Cuaron, Pavel Paveloski, Bo Burnham and Barry Jenkins so often at so many ceremonies and events I never need to see them again (7) realized I didn’t really miss FB that much (8) got enmeshed in a process that made me care about awards I didn’t even respect (8) learned anew never to underestimate the power of mediocrity.”

The 2019 Cannes jury should be interesting. The festival has announced the leader, and it’s Alejandro Gonzales Innaritu, multiple Oscar winner for “Birdman” and “The Revenant.” He won back to back Oscars for writing and directing each of those, and leading “Birdman” to a Best Picture win.

Innaritu has also won awards for movies like “Babel,” “Buitiful,” and “Amores Perros.”

So hold on: maybe he’ll choose Guillermo del Toro and Alfonso Cuaron to join him, plus Salma Hayek and Penelope Cruz. They’ll make it all Mexico and Spain. It would be a great theme for Cannes! All Oscar winners and nominees from those countries. We’ll drive Trump crazy!

Add to that the very strong possibility of a new Pedro Almodovar movie called “Pain and Glory” starring Antonio Banderas and Penelope.

I’m in!

PS I’d love it if Cannes would show Woody Allen’s “Rainy Night in New York.” So would the French!

I’m getting all kinds of emails this evening about the Oscars In Memoriam– and I’m on plane!!

The Academy really really goofed. They left out Oscar winning “Platoon” producer Arnold Kopelson and Gary Kurtz, nominated for producing “Star Wars.”

Jeez Louise.

Arnold Kopelson was beloved. Beloved! He also produced movies like “The Fugitive” and “US Marshalls.” The Kopelsons are an integral part of the Hollywood community for more than 40 years. What went wrong here? You can’t believe the mail I got on this one.

Gary Kurtz not only produced the original “Star Wars” movie, now called “A New Hope,” but he also co-produced George Lucas’s “America Graffiti” with Francis Ford Coppola, his first Oscar nomination. He also produced “The Empire Strikes Back” (the second “Star Wars” movie at that time), and Monte Hellman’s classic “Two Lane Blacktop.”

Yesterday I wrote about the other glaring omissions including Carol Channing and Stanley Donen.

It seems like if we’re going to support the new, very expensive Academy Museum, then we’ve got to pay respects to the people who made the museum possible content-wise.

So I will make this offer to the Academy for next year. Free of charge, no salary, nothing– I will personally vet the In Memoriam names starting mid December right  through the morning of the Oscars– February 9, 2020. Please, let me do it. No one wants mistakes like these. And I’m happy to help.

As usual, the In Memoriam segment of the Oscars has caused a trouble over who they omitted.

The most egregious error was Carol Channing. An actual past Oscar nominee, she was also a beloved entertainer. When she died, there was a real outpouring of love for her. This is where the show was tone deaf.

Also not included: the great John Mahoney, famous for “Frasier” on TV, but a movie actor with a substantial resume including “Moonstruck.”

The Academy also snubbed Sondra Locke, Verne Troyer, and Lee Ermey. Not nice. They also left out Mark Urman, who was so important for producing and distributing good films and died recently at age 66.

The worst, though, was Stanley Donen. Granted, he just died a few days ago, but in this digital age how hard could it be to drop a slide into the montage? He made “Singin’ in  the Rain,” the greatest movie musical.

It also would have been nice to use the music of Michel Legrand with the slides.

I’m sure there were  others left in the cold. Apparently, getting onto that list requires as much campaigning as getting an Oscar. One relative of someone who made the final cut told me he had to spend quite a bit of time lobbying the Academy, not to mention money on clip reels to make his point.