Jason Reitman (above), Jeremy Renner, and T Bone Burnett will each receive a special award at the 2010 edition of the Palm Springs Film Festival. Reitman will be handed the Director of the Year Award for Up in the Air, Renner the Breakthrough Performance Award for The Hurt Locker and Burnett the Frederick Loewe Award for Film Composing for Crazy Heart, whose star, Jeff Bridges, will also be honored at the festival.
Presented by Cartier, the Awards Gala will kick off the festival on January 5 at the Palm Springs Convention Center. The ceremony will be hosted by Mary Hart of Entertainment Tonight. The Palm Springs Film Festival runs January 5-18, 2010.
Jason Reitman had previously received the festival's Chairman's Vanguard Award for Juno in 2008. Up in the Air, which Reitman also co-wrote with Sheldon Turner (from Walter Kim's novel), has already been named best picture of 2009 by both the National Board of Review and the Washington D.C. Film Critics. In the film, a strong candidate for the 2010 Oscar, George Clooney plays a corporate downsizing expert whose frequent-flying life is about to come to a halt right when he meets the potential love of his life. Also in the cast are Anna Kendrick, Vera Farmiga and Jason Bateman.
Past PSIFF Director of the Year honorees include Sean Penn, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Anthony Minghella, Alexander Payne and Ang Lee.
Jeremy Renner has already won the National Board of Review Breakthrough Performance by an Actor award, and he and his fellow The Hurt Locker actors won the best ensemble award at the Gothams about a week ago. Kathryn Bigelow's war drama follows a team of bomb disposal experts in Baghdad.
Past PSIFF recipients of the Breakthrough Performance Award include Marion Cotillard, Jennifer Hudson, Felicity Huffman and Freida Pinto.
In addition to composing the Crazy Heart score with collaborator Stephen Burton, T Bone Burnett produced the film in which Jeff Bridges plays a down-and-out country singer opposite Maggie Gyllenhaal, Colin Farrell and Robert Duvall. Burnett also composed and co-wrote many of the film's original songs.
Past PSIFF recipients of the Frederick Loewe Award for Film Composing include Alexandre Desplat, James Newton Howard, Danny Elfman, Phillip Glass, Howard Shore and Randy Newman.