The IFP Gotham Awards usually benefit from being one of the first significant stops on the Oscar-season calendar, but it may have been too early for many of Monday night’s winners, who failed to show up.

Rachel Weisz, honored as part of the ensemble cast for the royal comedy “The Favourite,” brought paddles with the faces of her absent co-stars Emma Stone and Olivia Colman. The best-actress winner Toni Collette, the star of the horror film “Hereditary,” couldn’t make it, either: “I pushed her down the stairs,” joked her director, Ari Aster, who collected her trophy instead.

The sensitive drama “The Rider,” about a cowboy wrestling with injury, took best feature, yet the director, Chloé Zhao, was too busy working on a small-budget new film — a project that she’s squeezing in before a high-profile Marvel movie — to celebrate the unexpected victory for her low-budget breakthrough.

Even some of the winners in attendance were caught flat-footed. When the director Morgan Neville picked up the audience award for his Mister Rogers documentary, “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?,” he stared at the trophy as if it were a puzzle. “To say this is a surprise would be an understatement,” Neville said, “because I didn’t even know we were nominated” in the category. Earlier in the night, his film lost best documentary to “Hale County This Morning, This Evening.”