Geoffrey Rush Tribute (Santa Barbara Film Festival’s Montecito Award,2011)

Reviewed By Nick Hincapie. Viewed at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival 2011

On January 31st Geoffrey Rush was awarded the Montecito Award by the Santa Barbara Film Festival. It was nice to see him receive this honor  for his great career instead awarding it to someone whose just another big movie star. Everyone knows that he’s great actor whose given countless great performances in films like “Shine”, “Shakespeare in Love”, “Quills”, “Intolerable Cruelty”, “Pirates of the Caribbean”, “The Life and Death of Peter Sellers”, and more recently “The Kings Speech”.

The tribute was moderated by Pete Hammond who is always fun to see and started out with a video montage of all of Rush’s films. Rush looked very happy at the tribute and had a great sense of humor when answering questions. Rush talked about how he was discovered during a College play by the Queensland Theater Company. Throughout the tribute he talked about all the movies he’s done in his career. Rush recently wrapped production on the fourth “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie and told everyone his experience of working on that film with Johnny Depp.

In his career Rush has earned numerous awards including an Oscar for his Breakthrough performance in “Shine”, an Emmy for his role in “The Life and Death of Peter Sellers” and others as well.Rush continues to work on stage and had to fly back to Australia immediately after the tribute for  a stage production that he’s currently doing called “Diary of a Madman”. He explained that the stage allows an actor to explore a character and refine his craft.

For me the highlight moment of the night came when Colin Firth presented Rush with the award. Rush gave a very inspiring speech when he received his award and asked Hollywood to focus on real actors and not celebrities. I admired what Rush said because he cares about acting and wants people to see actors as hard workers instead of celebrities looking for attention and I couldn’t agree more.

At the end of tribute there was a surprise when Tom Hooper the director of “The Kings Speech” came up and presented his cast in the film with the first ever Ensemble award at the film festival. It was nice to see them all get the award the night after they won the SAG Award for best cast of the year so they were all probably having a great weekend. I was very happy to attend the tribute because Geoffrey Rush is a great actor and deserves to recognized for his work.