Day 156: Geoffrey Rush

I went downtown early again today to catch a couple movies before tonight's Geoffrey Rush Montecito Award. At the bus stop on campus I saw this sticker on a pay phone and was bummed that I don't see more of these around.

I saw Troubadours which was this documentary that just premiered at Sundance about James Taylor, Carole King, and a bunch of other artists from the 60's and 70's (CSNY, Elton John, The Eagles, Steve Martin, etc) and it was really good. 

Before every night's big event, they show the film that corresponds with the person achieving the award (For James Franco they showed 127 Hours, Christopher Nolan was Inception). Well tonight they were showing The King's Speech. I had never seen it before and after all the Oscar buzz its getting as well as David Seidler being amazing I went to it. The movie was pretty fucking good to be honest not "The best picture of the year".

I had some extra tickets to tonights award so I gave one to my Dad, one to my friend, and one to this girl who was celebrating her anniversary with her boyfriend and didn't have a ticket but he did. It felt good doing something nice for a random stranger instead of trying to huck it on craigslist for a couple bucks.

As we sat in the Arlington, you can see the guests walk the red carpet into the theatre. Heres Geoffrey Rush...

And the pretty much guaranteed Oscar winner for best actor, Colin Firth.

Geoffrey Rush was hilarious. He is a very animated person with a grate Aussie sense of humor. Apparently he flew out from Australia to accept this award and then had to leave early to fly back to Australia that night for some tiny play he is doing down unda.

Colin Firth gave a speech but then Tom Hooper (front runner right now for best director) and Helena Bonham Carter came out and said a few words while Rush ran to his car so he wouldn't miss his plane. I guess he got all the way to LAX before realizing he had a $7000 lav mike attached to his lapel.

We waited behind The Arlington and got Colin Firth's signature. Weeeeet.

Then Jasmin, Ryan, and I crashed this "Quebec Cinema" after party with all these drunk Canadians. There was this foot tall guy and I also met Michael Jackson's "ex" personal chef.

There was a female, blonde, DJ. The best kind of DJ.

All the Canadian filmmakers were posing in front of this thing on the red carpet, so we conned them into taking out picture too.

All good quality pictures courtesy of Ryan Turner.