Outfest 2012: “Any Day Now” wins audience award, the film’s star Alan Cumming is chosen best actor

Was happy to see the wonderful drama Any Day Now win the Audience Award for Outstanding US Drama.

No surprise really since the movie got such a warm reception Saturday when it screened at the DGA.

Director Travis Fine, so calm and collected at Saturday’s screening, was very emotional after winning the award – unsuccessfully choking back tears. He acknowledged the cast and crew and pointed out that his father was in the audience along with his wife and kids.

“This is for you guys,” he said.

Star Alan Cumming was a popular choice for the best actor prize for his performance as a professional drag queen who creates a family with a straight-laced assistant district attorney (Garret Dillahunt) and a teenager with Downs Syndrome (Isaac Leyva) who they are trying to adopt.

“This film is about family and there’s a big family attached to it,” Cumming said. “I’m so proud of this film.”

Judges praised the star for ‘bringing depth, humor, fierce wit, and emotional integrity to a moving portrait of a man who unexpectedly finds a family and the strength to fight for it.’

Cumming was present for both the screening and the awards ceremony.

‘I just really immediately responded to the story,’ said the Tony winning actor who currently stars on CBS’s The Good Wife. ‘It was a great character and it’s about something I really believe in.’

Fine said the film, set in 1979-80, is “just not a story that the people with money in the pockets would get behind.” He said it was much easier to get the film made once Cumming was aboard.

‘It all really started with Alan. … He said yes to this little, tiny film,’ Fine said. “This is a love story, a story about three people who happen to love each other very much.”

Leyva made his film debut in Any Day Now and said he’d like to make more films and continue what he called “my movie fantasy life.”

“My dream has come true,” he said.