After singing and dancing her way into the show during her monologue, host Aubrey Plaza sat down with Michael Shannon for a very sane conversation about her hosting duties to that point. It played out in a parody of one of the year’s weirder films, “The Lighthouse.”
In the skit, the duo played lighthouse keepers who just don’t get along, and when Plaza sees Shannon writing something in his log and asks him what he’s writing, Shannon tells her, “Nautical things.” She grabs the log and sees that he clearly didn’t like her opening monologue — and he especially didn’t like that she called out Shia LaBeouf and his career in her opening.
“Ye rewrote all me jokes,” Plaza laments.
Shannon, in one of the funnier references to the film, justifies rewriting Plaza’s jokes by saying the seagull, which sits atop the statue for the Independent Spirit Award never laughed. That was before he began farting up a storm… you’d really have to see the movie.
Directed by Robert Eggers, the off-kilter horror film stars Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe. “The Lighthouse” has been acclaimed since it premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. It is the follow-up to Eggers’ satanic period piece “The Witch,” and follows a pair of lighthouse keepers whose grip on sanity slowly dwindles as they grapple with the isolation that comes with being in a tiny tower surrounded by stormy weather. Filmed in black and white and in 4:3 ratio, Eggers’ direction and Dafoe and Pattinson’s performance drag the audience into the claustrophobic reality these two face.
Dafoe won the Independent Spirit for Best Supporting Male for his role in the film. Click here to see the full list of winners.