The Circuit

The 24th Santa Barbara Int'l Film Festival will honor Penélope Cruz with its Outstanding Performer of the Year Award on January 31.  The honor will be number two for Cruz, who gets lauded at the IFP's Gotham Awards on December 2. 

The tribute begins one in a series of announcements for the fest, which takes full advantage of its proximity to the awards season.

Noting the thesp's recent work in "Elegy" and "Vicky Cristina Barcelona," SBIFF exec director Roger Durling said, "There are few actresses who can today be described as international movie goddesses. Penélope Cruz has earned that description."

Previous Outstanding Performer awardees have included Angelina Jolie (2008), Helen Mirren (2007), and Heath Ledger (2006).

At the Santa Barbara fest, Jason Reitman gets the once-over for "Juno."

Richie Mehta’s drama “Amal” won the Santa Barbara International Film Festival’s Panavision Spirit Award for Independent Cinema, awarded to films made outside the Hollywood system.  The awards were announced at the festival’s Closing Night ceremonies on Feb 3.  Tao Ruspoli’s (pictured) LA odyssey “Fix” won the Heineken Red Star Award.  Best Foreign Film went to Martin Theo Krieger’s “Beautiful Bitch” while best Spanish language film was awarded to Pavel Giroud’s Cuban coming-of-age film “The Silly Age.”

The Iconix Video Award for best docu went to “One Bad Cat: The Reverend Albert Wagner Story,” Thomas G. Miller’s film on the Reverend’s scandal and supposed redemption.  The Fund for Santa Barbara Social Justice awarded Anne Slick and Danielle Bernstein’s doc “When the Clouds Clear,” about how international mining affects a small town.

Suzanne Chisholm and Michael Parfit’s “Saving Luna” won the Independent Audience Choice for Best Feature.

Photo by Ray Mickshaw/Wireimage.

Anne Thompson has a good report on the producers panel at Santa Barbara fest:

According to [James L.] Brooks [pictured above], on "As Good as it Gets" he shut the production down one day, a radical thing to do, and sat down with Helen Hunt and Jack Nicholson and worked things out. "It was a pivotal moment. All we did was look with mutual humility at the task ahead of us and what we needed."

Brooks admitted that it's burdensome to produce for himself as writer and director. "The dream is to find a producer who will die for you and I haven't found anyone other than myself to do that."

Full report here.

And check out Lael Loewenstein's report here.

It's pretty brave these days to introduce yet another award.  But sure enough, tonight arrives a late-in-the-day press release from Santa Barbara fest, announcing the creation of the Virtuoso Awards, to be given out to (who else) young Oscar nom hopefuls Casey Affleck, Marion Cotillard, James McAvoy, Ellen Page, and Amy Ryan. 

Suspiciously on the heels of Palm Springs' latest announcement, it's just the kind of thing that pricks a journalist's ears.  As I mentioned in a weekly feature, it's no news that fests compete with each other.  But it's something else to see it in action at the news desk.  The dueling announcements from these two fests are as seasonally predictable as the leaves turning red -- 

1. PS lunges with Sean Penn, Emile Hirsch, and Marion Cotillard. 
2. SB parries with Javier Bardem and Tommy Lee Jones (and a throw-in for indie street cred, Ryan Gosling). 
3. PS lashes back with Jerry Weintraub and Daniel Day-Lewis. 
4. There was this strange moment where they shot at each other. 
5. PS got a hyphenate with Helen Hunt. 

Leading to this latest salvo by SB.  Quite a cluster bomb – five red carpet walkers in one shot. 

One wonders what Palm Springs' next move is. 

And then it arrives, by mail no less - a quad-folded, glossy brochure from Palm Springs, packed with 13-plus celeb-heads and a choice LA Times quote stretched across its length:

"A huge, glittering affair, the Palm Springs International Film Festival has burst into a serious A-list star scene."

Take that, SB!  

And who’s winning so far?  If you're counting, it's Marion Cotillard.

Javier Bardem will get Santa Barbara fest's Montecito Award, "created in recognition of a performer who has given a series of classic and standout performances."  Reaching back from his recent turn as the coin-flipping killer Anton Chigurh in "No Country for Old Men," the fest highlighted his roles in "Jamon, jamon," "Live Flesh," and "Before Night Falls," for which he became the first Spaniard to garner and Oscar nom. 

Bardem also stars in Mike Newell's "Love in the Time of Cholera," screening next week at AFI FEST as the closing night film.


Photo: Scott McDermott, Corbis