Black Swan, Winter's Bone among Gotham nominees

The trio will go up against The Kids Are All Right and Let Me In for the main prize. The 20^th anniversary awards, which this year features a new public prize (see bottom), will be handed out in New York on November 29.

Documentary contenders are 12th & Delaware, Inside Job, The Oath, Public Speaking and Sweetgrass.

Nominees for the best ensemble performance are The Kids Are All Right, Life During Wartime, Please Give, Tiny Furniture and Winter’s Bone.

The breakthrough director categories pits John Wells for The Company Men against Kevin Asch for Holy Rollers, Glenn Ficarra and John Requa for I Love You Phillip Morris, Tanya Hamilton for Night Catches Us and Lena Dunham for Tiny Furniture.

Robert Duvall, Hilary Swank, director Darren Aronofsky and Focus Features CEO James Schamus will each be presented with a career tribute.

Breakthrough Actor nominees are Prince Adu in Prince Of Broadway, Ronald Bronstein in Daddy Longlegs, Greta Gerwig in Greenberg, Jennifer Lawrence in Winter’s Bone and John Ortiz in Jack Goes Boating.

Finally the contenders for Best Film Not Playing At A Theater Near You are Kati With An I, Littlerock, On Coal River, Summer Pasture and The Wolf Knife.

“The Gotham Awards celebrate the collective breath of independent cinema,” IFP executive director Joana Vicente said. “Ranging from the small gems produced on micro-budgets to extraordinary films from specialty distributors, the nominees all share the type of creative vision and risk-taking that are a hallmark of independent film. It’s also my pleasure to report that there are more female directors nominated this year than any year before.”

To be eligible for nomination entries must primarily be feature-length films with a point of view by US-based or US-born directors and producers. The films are to be independently distributed and must be produced with “an economy of means.”

The Independent Filmmaker Project (IFP) has created The Festival Genius Audience Award, eligible to a US film that has won an audience award at a US or Canadian film festival from November 2009 through October 2010. The Festival Genius community, which according to IFP amounts to roughly 200,000 film fans worldwide, will vote online for the winner. Nominees will be announced in early November.