MUMBAI: Oliver Stone’s
The festival, co-chaired by Paula Wagner and presented by STARZ, announced this year’s winner of the Hollywood Movie of the Year Award, which was chosen by the public voting online at the Yahoo! Movies and Entertainment Tonight websites.
The voting site received up to 20 million visitors and 99,280 votes were cast. The nominees for the Hollywood Movie of the Year Award were: Cars, The Da Vinci Code, The Devil Wears Prada, Little Miss Sunshine, Mission:Impossible 3, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, Superman Returns, United 93, World Trade Center and X-Men: The Last Stand.
The Hollywood Film Festival presented the Hollywood World Award to Volver by Pedro Almodovar. A comedy/drama from Spain, distributed by Sony Pictures Classics and starring Penelope Cruz, Carmen Maura, Lola Duenas, Blanca Portillo, and Yohana Cobo, “Volver” is the story of three generations of women who survive fire, insanity, superstition and even death by means of goodness, lies and boundless vitality.
The winners of the festival’s film competition were announced at the Hollywood Discovery Awards. This year’s winners are: Heavens Fall by Terry Green as Best Feature Film, The Empire in Africa by Philippe Diaz as Best Documentary, American Dreams by Eelko Ferwerda as Best Short Subject, Haptics by Mayur Deshpande as Best Animated Short Subject, and Smatka: Wrong Love by Gero von Braunmuehl as Best Music Video.
With programming of both domestic and international films, the festival presented over 80 films, including gala and world premieres of 20th Century Fox’s Flicka by Michael Mayer, starring Alison Lohman and Tim McGraw, STARZ’s Buy The Ticket, Take The Ride: Hunter S. Thompson on Film by Tom Thurman, featuring Johnny Depp, Benicio Del Toro, Sean Penn, John Cusack, and Bill Murray, among others, and DreamWorks Animation’s Flushed Away by David Bowers and Sam Fell, starring the vocal talents of Hugh Jackman, Kate Winslet, and Ian McKellen.
The festival’s closing night screenings included Sony Picture Classics’ Catch A Fire by Phillip Noyce, starring Tim Robbins and Derek Luke.
The Hollywood Film Festival also honored excellence in the art of filmmaking with a special presentation of films by Academy Award-winning filmmaker Oliver Stone, featuring his award-winning films like
Special honors went to Sony Pictures Classics’ co-Presidents Michael Barker and Tom Bernard for leadership; the Film Foundation for film preservation; Robin Williams for career achievement; Oliver Stone for directing; Mike Medavoy for producing; Forest Whitaker, Penelope Cruz, Ben Affleck, and Sandra Bullock for acting, the cast of Bobby (Harry Belafonte, Joy Bryant, Nick Cannon, Emilio Estevez, Laurence Fishburne, Brian Geraghty, Heather Graham, Anthony Hopkins, Helen Hunt, Joshua Jackson, David Krumholtz, Ashton Kutcher, Shia LaBeouf, Lindsay Lohan, William H. Macy, Svetlana Metkina, Demi Moore, Freddy Rodriguez, Martin Sheen, Christian Slater, Sharon Stone, Jacob Vargas, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, and Elijah Wood) for ensemble acting; Eric Roth for screenwriting; Vilmos Zsigmond for cinematography; Joel Cox for editing; Gustavo Santaolalla for film composing; John Myhre for production design; Penny Rose for costume design; Kris Evans for make-up; John Knoll for visual effects; Disney/Pixar’s Cars, directed by John Lasseter, for animation; and Francine Maisler for casting.
In addition, Derek Luke and Lindsay Lohan were honored with the festival’s Breakthrough Actor and Actress awards, and Ryan Murphy with the “Hollywood Breakthrough Director of the Year Award.”
