Annette Bening Receives Belated Telluride Film Festival Gold Medallion Tribute

On Saturday, January 6, Telluride Film Festival held a special tribute event in Los Angeles to honor four-time Academy Award nominee Annette Bening with the Gold Medallion Award presented by Meg Ryan. The event was hosted at Netflix’s Tudum Theater in Los Angeles and recognizes an artist’s significant contribution to the world of cinema.

This marks the first time that Telluride has presented this honor outside of the dates of its festival due to the SAG-AFTRA strike that began in July 2023 and lasted through fall festival season to November. Previous medallion recipients have included Cate Blanchett, Sir Anthony Hopkins, and Kate Winslet. Co-Director Chai Vasarhelyi introduced Telluride Film Festival Executive Director Julie Huntsinger who then welcomed Annette Bening and Jodie Foster to the stage. Jodie Foster, who plays best friend and coach Bonnie Stoll alongside Bening in NYAD, guided a career retrospective conversation about Annette’s approach to character development and what she has learned as an actress across her incredible body of work.

Following the conversation, a reel with clips from her career played and Actress/Director Meg Ryan then presented Bening with the Golden Medallion Award in front of a packed house. NYAD Producer Teddy Schwarzman, writer Julia Cox and real-life subjects Diana Nyad and Bonnie Stoll were also in attendance from the film.

WATCH: Annette Bening & Jodie Foster Roundtable Interview

Photo by Charley Gallay/Getty Images for Netflix

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Erik Anderson

Erik Anderson is the founder/owner and Editor-in-Chief of AwardsWatch and has always loved all things Oscar, having watched the Academy Awards since he was in single digits; making lists, rankings and predictions throughout the show. This led him down the path to obsessing about awards. Much later, he found himself in film school and the film forums of GoldDerby, and then migrated over to the former Oscarwatch (now AwardsDaily), before breaking off to create AwardsWatch in 2013.

He is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, accredited by the Cannes Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and more, is a member of the International Cinephile Society (ICS), The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics (GALECA), Critics Choice Association (CCA), San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle (SFBAFCC) and the International Press Academy. Among his many achieved goals with AwardsWatch, he has given a platform to underrepresented writers and critics and supplied them with access to film festivals and the industry and calls the Bay Area his home where he lives with his husband and son.

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