(Photo by EEAOO Courtesy of A24)

Film Independent announced their nominations for the 2023 Film Independent Spirit Awards yesterday by current Best Actress winner Taylour Paige (Zola) and 2022 Indie Spirit nominee Raúl Castillo (We are Animals), and some of this year’s presumed contenders got a big bump in building their case to Oscar voters.

Everything Everywhere All at Once led the way with eight nominations and TÁR followed close behind with seven. Both films were recognized in all of the major categories—Best Feature, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Lead Performance, and Best Supporting Performance—further announcing themselves as two of the season’s most beloved films. Other films that got big boosts with multiple nominations included Aftersun, Bones and All, and Women Talking (the latter of which was also announced as the winner of the Robert Altman Award for best acting ensemble).

The other big story was the acting categories. For the first time this year, Film Independent opted to go gender-neutral with their acting categories, nominating eight women and two men in the Best Lead Performance category, and then three women and seven men in the Best Supporting Performance category.

The Film Independent Spirit Awards announced a budget cap of $30 million for recognition in this year’s awards, which will take place on March 4. Though these awards (which began in 1984) have traditionally been held the day before the Oscars, this year they’re the week before, and they happen to fall in the middle of the Oscar voting period, which means they could have an outsized impact on this year’s Oscar results. That could be great news for films like Everything Everywhere All at Once, TÁR, and Women Talking, but it could also be a bad thing for The Whale, which was conspicuously shut out from these nominations. Did they get it right?

See the full list of nominees below and let us know what you think of the 2022 Film Independent Spirit Award nominations in the comments.