An alien fighter, an Oscar-nominated fine artist, and a familiar face across decades of Texas cinema are all to be part of the Texas Film Awards, as announced by the Austin Film Society today.
The gala event, which will be held at Robert Rodriguez’s Troublemaker Studios on March 5, will also celebrate the 25th anniversary of Spy Kids, the movie that changed audience’s perception of Robert Rodriguez as a gritty, adults-only kind of director. The ceremony will see the Star of Texas award bestowed on the film that helped establish Austin as a production hub, and Rodriguez, producer Elizabeth Avellan, and members of the cast will be in attendance.
Additionally, this year’s individual honorees represent the panoply of Texas film creatives. Leading the local contingent is Lone Star State indie icon Sonny Carl Davis. Cutting his performance teeth as a member of legendary Austin musical weirdos the Uranium Savages, Davis became part of indie cinema history as Frank in Eagle Pennell’s groundbreaking 1978 flick The Whole Shootin’ Match, a film that changed the definition of regional cinema and influenced Robert Redford to found the Sundance Film Festival. That led to a career as one of the great supporting and character actors, a perpetual “I recognize that guy” figure in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Lonesome Dove, Thelma & Louise, Bernie, and the Evil Bong films. He finally got another lead role with 2020’s Buck Alamo. And, yes, he was the definitive Texan at the diner for the famous 2018 anti-Ted Cruz ads.
Joining Davis is an artist whose formative and college years were spent in Texas. Filmmaker Julian Schnabel was born in New York but moved as a child to Brownsville before getting his BFA at the University of Houston. His career has been balanced between the art gallery and the art house cinema; it’s for the latter that he’s being honored, for films such as Basquiat, Before Night Falls, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (for which he received a Best Director Oscar nomination), and his most recent film, In the Hand of Dante, which premiered at last year’s Venice International Film Festival. AFS will also be hosting two screenings of that film, on March 2 and March 4, with Schnabel in conversation after the second screening.
And last but far from least is actress Sydney Chandler, who will follow in the footsteps of talents like Kaityln Dever and Jesse Plemons in receiving the Rising Star Award. The Austin native and St. Ed’s alum started her career locally, in Austin comedy The Golden Rutand as part of the online series SKAM, and while she’s on the national stage for her performances in Don’t Worry Darling and Pistol, she’s joined both elements of her career together with her Independent Spirit-award-nominated performance in FX’s Alien: Earth, created by last year’s Texas Film Award winner and Austin transplant, Noah Hawley.
AFS also announced that composer and musician JaRon Marshall (keyboardist for Grammy-nominated Black Pumas, Vieux Farka Touré and others) will serve as music director, with a band of Austin all-stars joining him for the gala awards show.
Tickets for the Texas Film Awards are available now at austinfilm.org/TFA.