TIFF Tribute Awards Recap: Kinda Cool, Kinda Weird (But With Peeks into Star’s Homes!)
Tracy Deer.
By Linda Barnard
Sir Anthony Hopkins plays Rachmaninoff “five hours, four hours” a day for mind and spirit, while everybody at Kate Winslet’s place, including her three kids, is teaching themselves to play the piano.
“Not necessarily a great thing in my house,” she joked.
A media conference ahead of Tuesday night’s TIFF Tribute Awards gave a peek into the lives of the stars during COVID-19 as they spoke from their living rooms and home offices in England to the California coast.
Winslet, whose film Ammonite had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, said she isn’t joining the family keyboard project. She’s started making dinner at 10 am so everybody can eat to the dictates of Zoom meetings and working from home.
The same stars-at-home feeling continued that evening as TIFF Tribute Awards were handed out in virtual fashion in an hour-long CTV broadcast from an eerily near-empty TIFF Bell Lightbox theatre.
It was strange to know that in other times, the place would have been packed with festival goers. Only TIFF co-heads Cameron Bailey and Joana Vicente, along with show hosts Chloe Wilde and Tyrone Edwards of etalk, were in the theatre, all standing well apart from each other.
Were the honorees even wearing pants, or was it a fancy top and sweats situation? Why did some of them have great lighting and others look like they were in those four-poses-for-a-quarter photo booths from my childhood?
That relaxed vibe was especially true of Colin Farrell, who presented Nomandland director Chloé Zhao with her TIFF Ebert Director Award with a speech about her passion for exploring universal human themes while sporting a patchy grey beard and clad in what most of us have been calling workwear for the past six months: a ripped T-shirt with a camo bandana on his head.
It was a big change from the inaugural TIFF Tribute Awards gala a year ago, begun as a fundraising effort to help bankroll TIFF’s year-round programing. Celebrities including Meryl Streep, Antonio Banderas, and Gary Oldman arrived on a red carpet outside a Fairmont Royal York Hotel ballroom. Later, 500 guests who’d paid handsomely for the chance to rub elbows with movie stars in between bites of beef tenderloin, watched the boldface make speeches that ranged from political and serious to humorous.
Joaquin Phoenix, who received one of the TIFF Tribute Actor Awards (the other went to Streep) picked up his award and confessed he didn’t know why he was getting it or from whom. New Zealand actor-director Taika Waititi, who was sitting at a table next to me, did some hilarious mugging throughout the evening.
This year’s TIFF Tribute Awards may have been different, but it was still an impressive effort, low-key yet polished.
In addition to Winslet and Hopkins, recipients of the TIFF Tribute Actor Award and Zhao, Mohawk filmmaker and Beans director Tracey Deer received the TIFF Emerging Talent Award. Mira Nair, whose mini-series A Suitable Boy, screens in part as TIFF’s closing night film, received the Jeff Skoll Award in Impact Media. And composer Terence Blanchard was recipient of the TIFF Variety Artisan Award. He scored two films at TIFF 2020: Regina King’s One Night in Miami… and Halle Berry’s directing debut, Bruised.
The show producers wrangled an impressive slate of presenters: Regina King, Olivia Colman, Ava DuVernay, Jody Foster, Delroy Lindo and Bollywood star Tabu.
The awards, a tall gold statuette designed to mimic the light spilling from the window of a projection booth, were in the recipients’ hands as they made acceptance speeches. Winslet said she had to put her down, for fear she’d drop it on her foot.