Barbie auteur Greta Gerwig and star Ryan Gosling will be coming to San Francisco for next week's SFFILM Awards, and the star-studded event will also include a lifetime achievement award being given to actor Nicolas Cage.
SFFILM, the organization behind the annual San Francisco International Film Festival, announced Wednesday that the honorees at this years SFFILM Awards Night will be Oscar nominee Greta Gerwig, Oscar winner Nicolas Cage, Oscar winner Roger Ross Williams, and writer and filmmaker Cord Jefferson. The awards ceremony will be held on Monday, December 4, at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts — and it's a fundraiser for SFFILM, so ticket prices start at $1,000.
Ryan Gosling — who seems like a shoe-in for another Oscar nod this year for his performance as Ken in Barbie — will be on hand to present the The Irving M. Levin Award for Film Direction to Gerwig. Past heavyweights who have received the award include Francis Ford Coppola, Spike Lee, Oliver Stone, Kathryn Bigelow, Jane Campion, and last year's honoree Ryan Coogler.
Gerwig, who has previously been nominated for Academy Awards for Ladybird and Little Women, has yet to win a major directorial prize, though she seems all but guaranteed to be in the mix at the Oscars again this year.
Cage will be honored with the Maria Manetti Shrem Lifetime Achievement Award for Acting — which last year was given to Barbie star Margot Robbie, and other previous honorees include Robin Williams, Jeremy Irons, and Glenn Close.
No presenter has yet been locked down for Cage's award, and it seems likely that a high-profile name will be added to the bill.
As SFFILM Executive Director Anne Lai tells the Chronicle, pulling the awards ceremony together has been a particular challenge this year in the wake of the four-month SAG/AFTRA strike, during which time no Hollywood stars were available to promote their films. After it ended, everyone has gone into crazy-busy mode, and getting this year's SFFILM Awards together in its traditional first-week-of-December timeframe was no easy feat.
"Everyone’s schedule was particularly tight," Lai tells the paper.
This year's other honorees includes director Roger Ross Williams, who will receive the newly named Nion McEvoy & Leslie Berriman Award for Storytelling, and who has had three high-profile projects released this year. One is the biographical feature film Cassandro, starring Gael García Bernal, about the life of gay wrestler Saúl Armendáriz, a.k.a. Cassandro. Williams also co-directed the Apple TV+ documentary series The Super Models, about the careers of Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista, Christy Turlington, and Naomi Campbell. And the HBO documentary Love to Love You, Donna Summer. Williams' production company One Story Up also produced the acclaimed food series High On The Hog on Netflix.
In 2009, Williams became the first African American director to win a directing Oscar, for Documentary Short Subject, for his film Music By Prudence.
The George Gund III Award, which is given each year to "one of world cinema’s outstanding visionaries" regardless of their craft, will be given to Emmy award-winning writer Cord Jefferson (The Watchmen, Station Eleven, Succession, The Good Place). This year, Jefferson made his directorial debut with American Fiction, starring Jeffrey Wright, which has a release date of December 22.
As in years' past, SFFILM Awards Night will include a cocktail reception and dinner. You can inquire about tickets by emailing [email protected].
"Greta, Roger, Cord, and Nicolas all wear many creative hats, develop bold new ideas, and are distinguished in more than one field," Jessie Fairbanks, SFFILM director of programming, said in a statement. "We selected these four individuals because each person brings a fearlessness to the craft of cinema, pushing the art form and offering incisive commentary on the world. We need their voices now more than ever."
IndieWire has called the SFFILM Awards "an awards stop on the road to the Oscars." And the SF International Film Festival, which happens for two weeks every April, is the longest running film festival in the Americas, having been founded in 1957.
Photo: Greta Gerwig and Ryan Gosling attend 'The cast of 'Barbie' appear on SiriusXM's 'The Jess Cagle Show' at SiriusXM Studios on June 26, 2023 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Emma McIntyre/Getty Images for SiriusXM)