As I’ve posted about before, Slated hosts online film guides for film festivals via its Festival Genius service, which offers easy searchability, customized, conflict-free schedules, integrated ticketing, and film ratings.

Slated offers a free iPhone app (here), which includes all the film festivals it hosts.  This app includes a festival’s entire line-up of films, events, etc., including up-to-the minute changes.  If you’ve every had to carry around a paper schedule, you’ll appreciate just how much sense this makes.

Certain festivals, however, also hire Slated to create a dedicated iPhone app just for their festival.  The most recent festival to do just that is this week’s Slamdance festival (held in Park City, Utah, at the same time and right alongside the Sundance festival).

Slamdance counts among its many alumni such filmmakers as Steven Soderbergh (Erin Brockovich, Ocean’s 11, 12, 13), Christopher Nolan (Inception), Marc Forster (Monster’s Ball, Quantum of Solace), and Jared Hess (Napoleon Dynamite).

You can download the free Slamdance/Slated iPhone app here.

Last night’s IFP’s Gotham Awards saw the presentation of the first-ever Festival Genius Audience Award.  The five nominees for the award were determined by over 12,000 votes from audiences around the country.

[The award was created by Slated, the company I started last year with a few friends, and it’s named after our Festival Genius technology, which operates the online program guides for film festivals.  We also recently released a free companion iPhone app you can get here.  I previously posted about Slated, first here and then here.]

I’m happy to report that the winner of last night’s Festival Genius award is Waiting for Superman, Davis Guggenheim’s highly acclaimed documentary on American’s public-education system.  It’s a terrific film and a fantastic start for a new award.

It seems only appropriate to to close with Mr. Wilder:  “An audience is never wrong.  An individual member of it may be an imbecile, but a thousand imbeciles together in the dark — that is critical genius.”

A little while back I posted about Slated, a company I started last year with a few others.  One thing Slated does is run the online film guides for film festivals, helping audience members easily find what’s playing and create a personalized schedule, plus buy tickets for the films and rate them.  This service is called, modestly enough, Festival Genius.  Last year it was used by over 200 film festivals.

Well, nearly everyone and everything else has created an award, so why not poor little FG?  No reason at all.  That’s kind of what we’ve been thinking.

So on November 29 at the Gotham Film Festival in NYC, the first-ever Festival Genius Award will be given in partnership with the IFP, which runs the fest.  The Hollywood Reporter piece on it is here.

The five nominees have been announced, and they include Winter’s Bone, starring Jennifer Lawrence, who hails from my hometown of Louisville.  We screened Winter’s Bone this past June at Louisville’s Flyover Film Festival.

Now, I know how reluctant you readers are to voice your opinions, but please, feel free to speak up for once in your life and vote for your favorite here.  We live in a democracy, most of the time — exercise your right to opine.