Jan. 5 (UPI) -- Tom Hanks, star of this year's Captain Phillips and Saving Mr. Banks, received the Palm Springs Film Festival's Chairman's Award Saturday night with a good-natured swipe at "this little, intimate, Sonny Bono rec-room chicken dinner get-together for two-and-a-half-thousand people."
Hanks and a number of Hollywood luminaries -- including Sandra Bullock, Hellen Mirren, Idris Elba, Julia Roberts, Amy Adams, Bono, Richard Gere, Diane Lane and Chiwetel Ejiofor -- hit the annual awards dinner in anticipation of Wednesday's deadline for Oscar nomination votes.
"To be invited to the Palm Springs International Film Festival is an honor and a delight beyond words and sometimes beyond reasoning," Hanks added. "It means without a doubt the holidays have come to an end and for a few lucky people, the celebrity mule train is just beginning."
Matthew McConaughey, who won for Dallas Buyers Club, described his work on set.
“There was never enough money, we did it under $5 million, not enough time, the shoot took 28 days. There was enough food on the set but we couldn’t eat it," he said, in reference to his character's weight loss.
Margo Martindale presented her August: Osage County costar Meryl Streep with the festival's Icon Award, joking "they might have just created it to get Meryl to come to Palm Springs.”
""I feel like I'm an example now in my dotage that you just can't put those old gals out to pasture," Streep told the crowd.
Gravity's Sandra Bullock got some of the biggest laughs when she stepped onstage to receive her Desert Palm Achievement Award and joked about a supposed feud between her and Roberts.
"Julia, you and I are in a feud over George Clooney. We talked about this right? It's shared custody," she said.
[Los Angeles Times, The Desert Sun, Variety, E! News]
