The always-reliable and smartly-snapping Drew Altizer stopped by the SF Film Society's red carpet awards ceremony on Saturday and passes along these views of the scene! Award recipients this year included: Robin Williams and Spike Lee (both of whom were eye-catchingly dressed and whose pictures are after the jump), and George Lucas, who's pictured above with Ron Howard and John Lasseter from Pixar. Thanks, Drew! Extra bonus: if you go through Drew's pictures on......

Total number of people pictured in this week's Swells society column: 100. (It's all pictures and captions this week, with no dishy Catherine Bigelow text, we're sorry to report.) Total number of people pictured whom we recognize: 14 (including Vanessa Carlton and Stephan Jenkins, Joan Chen, and a Chron reporter we see from time to time when we go out for drinks with Eve). Minority count: 24 (24%). Hats, capes, tiaras: 2, 0 (but 5......

We're begging for your help here, readers -- begging! Can someone with a digital camera PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE go to this event and send us your pictures of Chris Daly getting thrown into a swimming pool? We'll throw in some SFist swag if you do! We'd go ourselves, but admission is $125 (and we don't have a digital camera anyways). The Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Center is sponsoring their 16th Annual Celebrity Pool Toss this Tuesday......

As we find ourselves gearing up for this year's SF Indie Fest (of which we're a sponsor! whoo yay us!) we find ourselves wondering ... is it enough? All these festivals that SF has -- the Indie Fest, Frameline, the Int'l Fest, Hole in the Head, the recently-concluded Noir Fest -- sure, they're all swell, but is that all there is? No, apparantly, according to the SF Film Society. As a part of their recently-launched......

We can't explain it any better than SF Film Society Exec Direc Graham Leggat put it to us: "We're interested in creating a public/private partnership between the city, corporations, foundations, media arts organizations, the school districts, and other interested parties, to install a network of digital projectors in select high school auditoriums around the city. You would then use broadband or satellite or hard drives to supply independent content... non-Hollywood content, with lesson plans and......

Okay, this next component of the SF Film Society's new SF360 program is a bit low-concept, but you're a smart cookie so you should pick it up pretty quick. Listen: "We want to explore the way new platforms help us bring new work to new audiences," Graham Leggat, Exec Direc of the SFFS told us in an interview. So to that end, they're going to select one film, then work with distribution partners like the......

Hey, didja hear about SF360's upcoming website? The SF Film Society and Indiewire.com promise that the site (to be launched in March) will offer a slew of new tools for local filmmakers and audiences -- "blogs, video blogs, photo blogs, event planning, announcements, virtual production offices, project-based LANs," the SFFS's Exec Direc Graham Leggat told us, but what he said next is what really grabbed our attention: "We don't have a revenue model for this."......

We saw the saddest obituary last week in the Chron, for the death of Sarah Tucker, a 26-year-old Mission resident who was killed in a hit-and-run bicycle accident on Polk and Geary Street on Thursday January 12. Witnesses reported seeing a black Honda CRV run a yellow light, and heard Tucker loudly shout "Hey!" before she was struck. The driver, reported to be an African-American man in his 40s, then turned off his headlights to hinder the reading of his license plate and drove away. Tucker, who was wearing her helmet, suffered severe head injuries and died shortly afterwards. Tucker, as she was known, was returning home from the Tango, Tango dance party when she was killed. Tucker was a fundraiser for the Cal Academy of Sciences by day and a filmmaker/DJ at night, volunteering for the SF Film Society, screening movies for the SF Int'l Film Fest, and running the Pretty Young Thing dance party at the Make-Out Room, among many other activities. As the obit says, "Sarah loved pugs, soul music, dancing, acronyms, sticky buns, fashion and aesthetics." If you see a black Honda CR-V with a large dent in its side on the passenger door, call SFPD Inspector Pat Tobin of the hit-and-run division at (415) 553-1641 or the confidential tip line (415) 575-4444. There's a $10,000 reward for information leading to an arrest. Please, folks, ride and drive safely out there. You probably love pugs and sticky buns too. ...

Well, we enjoyed being all coy and evasive for a while, but now that the SF Film Society has officially announced their SF360 campaign, we're free to reveal to you all the juicy details, like a new broadbanded network of digital projectors that they're installing around the city; or a brand new film festial-convention-market for animation; or their new initiative to, as Executive Director Graham Leggat put it, turn all of SF into an "exploded......

We have to admit, we weren't buying it two weeks ago when the San Francisco Film Society invited us to a pre-Sundance rally at the posh Adagio Hotel. The haute couture, the DJ, the tiny appetizers and free beer -- "surely," we thought, "this must be nothing more than an excuse to have one of those bourgeois parties we're always protesting alongside our Communist friends." But no! No! Just like when we famously predicted that......