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.

So I haven’t mentioned it before, but last year some friends and I started Slated, a company in the tech and film area.  Then, earlier this year, we bought B-Side, an Austin, Texas company.  Their product, Festival Genius, runs the online film guides for film festivals (200+ last year).

Most festivals’ sites are a bit of a mess, frankly.  The organizers rightly put their time and energy into finding the films and running the festival.  (And as a festival co-founder, I know just how demanding that can be.)  But it’s another huge task to tell attendees about the films, when/where they’re playing, how to buy tickets, etc.

So Festival Genius handles all that and more.  Among many other things, FG makes a festival’s films easy to find, read about and rate, and it even creates a conflict-free viewing schedule for you (just what every festival attendee has been hoping for).

Tomorrow until Sept 30, the Fantastic Fest is running in Austin, TX, and their site is using Festival Genius. The festival home page is here, and the Festival Genius part of their site is here.

Even better, Fantastic Fest hired us to create a free iPhone app for them.  No need to carry about the paper schedule–it can all be on your phone.  To the right is the app’s splash page, and below that is a sample screen, showing part of the festival’s schedule.  An intro to the app is here, and the iTunes link to download it is here.

It’s a terrific boon for festival goers, so if you know anyone near Austin, give them a shout about it.  They’ll thank you.  Maybe not with an expensive car, but they’ll thank you nonetheless.