Last weekend saw a movie awards night with a difference: the inaugural Australian Independent Film Awards presented by Australian streaming service OzFlix, which anointed not one best picture but three, based on production budget.

The comedy That's Not Me won best film under $500,000, the based-on-fact sex-crime thriller Hounds of Love won in the under $2 million category, and Warwick Thornton's indigenous western Sweet Country was voted best under $5 million, the cut-off mark for entrants.

Each was a worthy winner, and splitting the field this way meant movies were judged in relation to the context in which they were made, a thoroughly novel but quite sensible approach. Not many people saw the $80,000 indie flick That's Not Me at the cinema, for example, but many who did came to the same conclusion: for the money, it's terrific.

All of which raises an interesting thought. If it makes sense to judge Australian movies with allowance made for their budgets, is it perhaps time that we also paid for those movies at the cinema on the same basis?