SubscribeOscar's out-of-town tryout tour hits Palm Springs
Dustin Hoffman summed up Tuesday night's swanky 20th annual Palm Springs International Film Festival award gala best:
"First the Golden Globes co-opted the Academy Awards, and now Palm Springs has co-opted the Golden Globes," he proclaimed. "Watch out, because next is gonna be the Fairfax District Awards!"
With all the various award shows, galas, banquets, critics' love-ins, etc. it is hard to get a piece of the pie. But now in its 20th year, the Palm Springs fest has figured out how to become an integral part of the season — by making sure its star-studded centerpiece gala falls during the crucial Oscar nomination voting period, even if that means it has to happen on a school night.
With no breathing room between the holidays and Golden Globes and Critics Choice awards, PSIFF had to dish out trophies on a Tuesday this year or face the prospect of a less-than-starry turnout. If there were any worries the faithful would show up, they were alleviated at the packed and impressively organized black-tie affair held in the (way too) dark and cavernous main hall of the Palm Springs Convention Center.
The turnout of honorees was glittering and downright impressive: Clint Eastwood, Hoffman, Gus Van Sant, Amy Adams, Anne Hathaway, Ron Howard, Sean Penn, "Slumdog Millionaire's" Frieda Pinto, Dakota Fanning, "Benjamin Button" composer Alexandre Desplat and almost the entire cast of "Revolutionary Road," led by Leonardo DiCaprio. Not by coincidence, every single one of them is the focus of an Oscar campaign.
The only scheduled attendee to skip the event was Kate Winslet, struck by an ear infection that grounded her on doctor's orders in New York. The doc is apparently not threatening to KO her trip to the REALLY big award gala on Sunday, however. You know, that little old Globes thing where she happens to have two acting nominations and a decent bet to turn at least one of them ("The Reader" or "Revolutionary Road") into gold.
Loads of photographers and press lined the red carpet with a special spot at the front AND exclusive access backstage for "Entertainment Tonight," whose host Mary Hart was emceeing this event for the sixth straight year. In addition to the honorees, the event drew such presenters as Ben Stiller, Donald Sutherland, Frank Langella, Josh Brolin, Rosemarie DeWitt and James Cromwell.
Started two decades ago by then-Mayor Sonny Bono as an idea to bring commerce to his city, the festival has clearly turned into a place to be seen in a key balloting period of the award season. It also doesn't hurt that a few Oscar voters happen to live in the desert, even though, as one studio wag who schlepped his contenders down there said, "this is the place where academy members go to die." Indeed, the crowd wasn't exactly young, as Hoffman remarked after his presenter (and son in "Meet the Fockers") Ben Stiller said he was amazing for a 92-year-old actor (he's really 71).
"OK, Ben brought up my age, but I looked around the room. I don't know what the median age is here, but this is not the MTV awards," he said.
And Hart hit the subject too by commenting on the quality of the face lifts in the crowd.
"Plastic surgeons must be better here than in Beverly Hills, because you certainly aren't aging since last year," she joked.
Sponsored in large part by Cartier, which got lots of garish plugs on stage, this year's gala raised more than $1 million for the Palm Springs International Film Society. An 18-piece orchestra played the honorees on and off, although the choice of "Superfreak" to bring out Penn was rather odd. Eastwood seemed visibly impressed that the band knew his "Gran Torino" theme song as he walked on stage. DiCaprio and the "Revolutionary Road" group were introduced to the strains of the theme song from "Titanic." What? No hit tunes in "Rev Road"?
Festival Director Darryl McDonald told us that stars like coming to the festival because it's not televised and is much more relaxed than most things of this type. The veteran fest organizer has brought this one a long way and has a promising lineup of films over the next two weeks, including many U.S. premieres. Still, the first half of the show was on the slow side — bogged down by the corporate speechifying and by-the-numbers acceptances from Fanning, Adams and Van Sant (who ho-humbly accepted the Sonny Bono Visionary Award but delivered a nice and classy shout-out to McDonald, who gave him his first-ever fest exposure in 1984).
Hathaway used her time to ramble on about the metaphysical meaning of "creativity," leading Hart to ask afterward, "Whatever happened to good 'ol beautiful blond bimbos?"
By the way, the hugely talented and appealing Hathaway, widely acclaimed for her work in "Rachel Getting Married" and a likely lead actress Oscar nominee, could run into some trouble if any academy voters actually see her new film, "Bride Wars." She and Kate Hudson play lifelong best friends who tear each other apart over a wedding date conflict. The dreadful comedy is likely to get pummeled by critics in the same way "Norbit" was when it was released in the middle of Oscar voting two years ago, perhaps costing its star, Eddie Murphy, the award for his work in "Dreamgirls."
Second half of the gala was a real winner with a very heartfelt tribute to Howard, celebrating his 50th year in show business and receiving PSIFF's Directorial LIfetime Achievement Award from his eloquent "Frost/Nixon" star, Langella.
The real-life Cleve Jones presented the Desert Palm Achievement Award for best actor to "Milk's" Sean Penn, who was also honored at the fest in 2008 as a director for "Into The Wild." Penn gracefully recalled how awestruck he was by another honoree there.
"Last year I saw what Daniel Day-Lewis did in 'There Will Be Blood,' and I said I am gonna have to work harder. Well, I did."
Stiller was hilarious in his intro to Chairman Award winner Hoffman.
"He is the reason short Jewish guys are allowed to be in movies," he said.
Biggest laugh of the night, though, didn't go to Stiller but to Donald Sutherland, who in introducing Eastwood's career achievement award talked about how any actor dreams of getting an invitation to appear in one of Eastwood's films, as he did when he got the call to do "Space Cowboys."
"I got a call from Clint that went right to the point. He said, 'Would you be interested for $100,000 to play a role in a new film I am going to direct?' Well, you can't breathe when you get that call. You just say yes. But then I said, 'Can you give me a couple of days to raise the $100,000?"
Eastwood got the night's biggest standing ovation and momentarily forgot his wife's and daughter's names when he started to thank them. He also assured the audience he isn't done yet.
"I still have a couple of more rabbits in the hat."
Those rabbits include a Nelson Mandela biopic with Morgan Freeman and a "Babel"-like drama called "Hereafter," written by Peter Morgan, both slated for production this year.
Confirming the emergence of Palm Springs in the upper echelons of the festival pantheon, a very crowded and fun after-party was held at the Parker Hotel, drawing most of the stars, including Eastwood, DiCaprio, Josh Brolin, Hathaway and Penn, who seemed to be having a great time. A publicist said the same thing happened last year, when he closed the place down.
In award seasons, some things never change.
— Pete Hammond
