The Virtuosos Awards

Reviewed by Alex Descano. Viewed at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival 2011.

Every year the Santa Barbara International Film Festival presents new and upcoming actors with the “Virtuosos Awards”. These awards are meant to honor the actors for breakthrough performances in the previous year. This year’s award winners included Hailee Steinfeld for True Grit, John Hawkes for Winter’s Bone, Lesley Manville for Another Year, and Jacki Weaver for Animal Kingdom. Andrew Garfield was also supposed to be awarded a “Virtuoso Award” for his performance in The Social Network, but unfortunately he was unable to attend the ceremony.

As in previous years, the award ceremony was held at Santa Barbara’s beautiful Lobero Theatre. Ticket holders lined up around the block of the theatre waiting to get in. Unlike all the other award ceremonies I attended at the film festival,  the ceremony began promptly and there was hardly a wait to get in. This proved to be a good start of the night, but it was quickly counteracted when the moderator announced Andrew Garfield would not be present for the ceremony. To be honest, Garfield was my main attraction for attending the event so I was rather upset to hear this unfortunate news.

I decided to stay for the ceremony anyway and tried to enjoy the rest of the evening, but the outcome definitely did not exceed my expectations. First of all, I felt as if the ceremony was a bit rushed. The other tributes I had attended at the film festival usually lasted around two hours and honored just one actor. The “Virtuosos Awards” barely hit the two hour mark, yet they honored four different actors. In fact, they were intended to honor five actors if Garfield would have been able to make it. Being how more actors were being recognized I assumed it might take a bit longer than the individual ceremonies, but it was quite the opposite. It seemed as if each actor only had a mere five minutes on stage with the moderator, such a little amount of time that it was hard to have the chance to understand and grasp the nature of their work. I can’t say I am too familiar with the actors that were presented the awards so the fact that they weren’t able to talk for long was disappointing to me.

Even though each actor was only on stage for a brief period of time, it seemed as if Hailee Steinfeld stayed on for much longer than all the others. Perhaps some audience members enjoyed this because they were in awe of her due to her outstanding performance in True Grit, but I found it to be rather annoying. I had come to the ceremony with the intention of recognizing all the actors mentioned, not just Hailee Steinfeld. In fact, I found her to be the most uninteresting actor presented of the night. Beside the fact that she is very young, there was nothing captivating about her and she had nothing remotely fascinating to say.

The two actors I enjoyed the most were definitely John Hawkes and Jacki Weaver. Hawkes was the first actor to be recognized at the ceremony and by far the funniest. He immediately had the crowd laughing and empathizing with him as he explained how strange it was to see himself on the big screen. He even mentioned how he is already “sick of himself” so he can’t imagine what others must feel about him. Jacki was also extremely intriguing to listen to because she has been acting for so long. Her repertoire includes several different works ranging from TV series in the 60s to her latest film, Animal Kingdom.

The greatest surprise of the night came at the end of the ceremony when Toy Story 3 director, Lee Unkrich, presented the actors with their awards. The hilarity in his appearance came from the fact that just minutes before Weaver announced she hoped to work on “Toy Story 4” as her next endeavor.

Overall, the “Virtuosos Awards” was somewhat of an entertaining night but nowhere near the most exciting event of the film festival.