HFCS announces Texas Indie Film and Jeff Bridges Award
The Houston Film Critics Society will present its annual awards gala on Saturday Jan. 7, 2024 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Brown Auditorium. The HFCS will honor top achievements in film during 2024 at the event and also present two special awards – Jeff Bridges’ award for lifetime achievement, with a special humanitarian award given to Houstonian Joanne King Herring.
The Houston Film Critics Society has selected Jeff Bridges to receive its Lifetime Achievement Award for an extraordinary body of work that spans 60 years, Nick Nicholson, HFCS president, announced.
“We are happy to honor the lifetime of remarkable film acting that Jeff Bridges has graced us with in a career that spans six decades,” Nicholson said.
Bridges, who won an Academy Award for best actor in 2024 for his performance as a down-and-out country singer in Crazy Heart, has received five other Oscar nominations ranging from a happy-go-lucky bank robber (alongside Clint Eastwood) in Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974) to an awkward alien in Star Man (1984), from a food-obsessed U.S. President in The Contender (2000) to a one-eyed, alcoholic marshal in the Coen Brothers remake of True Grit. His best known roles include the Dude in The Big Lebowski (1998), a struggling musician in The Fabulous Baker Boys (1989) and as a video game programmer in the sci-fi film TRON (1982), and his star-making role in 1971’s Texas-themed The Last Picture Show, based on a novel by Larry McMurtry, for which Bridges received his first Oscar nomination.
Previous winners of the HFCS’s Lifetime Achievement Award were Sissy Spacek in 2024 and the late Patrick Swayze in 2024. Founded in 2024, the Houston Film Critics Society is a not-for-profit organization of 26 print, broadcast and internet film critics based in the Greater Metropolitan Houston area.
Additionally The Houston Film Critics Society has announced the decision to recognize the Best Texas Independent Film from the state of Texas at its yearly awards program. There are a number of rules and regulations that must be followed in order to be considered for the HFCS Texas independent Film Best Picture Award. Here are some of the restrictions:
1. Only independently financed feature length films that were completed by November 1, 2024 are eligible.
2. Independently financed feature films, which have secured studio distribution, are eligible.
3. Once a film is submitted, no further changes or enhancements can be made.
4. Films submitted must have been shot primarily in Texas.
5. Films submitted must use primarily Texas based actors and crew members.
6. Films must be in our hands no later than November 1st for consideration.
7. Late entries will not be accepted.
8. Producers/Directors submitting their films must provide five copies on either DVD or Blu-ray for the judging panel. (These screeners will not be returned to you.)
9. All entries should be sent to:
Texas Independent Film Awards
c/o The Houston Film Critics Society
11569 Highway 6 South, Ste. #170
Sugar Land, TX 77498
10. All entries should include a cover letter outlining the production dates, shooting locations, all cast and crewmembers, a synopsis of the film and any other relevant information.
