Last Wednesday, the Santa Barbara International Film Festival threw a big party to hand out what they called the Virtuosos Award. One definition of “virtuoso” that I found was, “a person who has special knowledge or skill in a field,” and I think that’s especially true of the five actors the fest so named this year: Casey Affleck (Best Supporting Actor Oscar nominated for The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford), Marion Cotillard (Best Actress nominated for La Vie En Rose), Ellen Page (Best Actress nominated for Juno), James McAvoy (oddly enough not Oscar nominated for Atonement), and Amy Ryan (Best Supporting Actress nominated for Gone Baby Gone).

The award ceremony managed to get all five actors on stage at the same time at the conclusion of a night filled with individual Q&As with each of them, a rare feat when you think about it. It’s not often that audiences get to enjoy so many ridiculously talented actors discussing their craft and experiences together. You learn all sorts of wonderful things, like what goes through McAvoy’s head before and during filming sex scenes. For example, he faults most directors for being wishy-washy on the subject, nervous about how to address it; consequently, the actors are left to fend for themselves, when, the truth is, the scene needs to be as plotted and choreographed as an action sequence. Put the young Scotsman in bed with an actress and he begins to think, in his words, “I’m not doing my job properly if I don’t feel your boobs now, but maybe I’ll overstep my bounds if I do touch your boobs.”

Affleck, who stepped out of his brother’s shadow this year with two breakout roles, joked about his experiences working with Brad Pitt on the Ocean’s movies before shooting Jesse James. “It would be Brad three feet in front of the camera, and me and Elliot Gould 65 feet in the background pretending to talk.” This time around, the friends didn’t rehearse together and barely conversed on set, in order to maintain the uncomfortable distance between James and Ford.

Because of their limited film resumes, it was more difficult for the moderator to draw anecdotes out of Cotillard and Ryan, particularly Cotillard who, being French, was not as articulate as she probably would have liked to have been. Her greatest challenge in taking on Edith Piaf turned out to be playing the singer from 19 to 47, a remarkable range. The stunningly beautiful young woman who looks nothing like the ugly Piaf said she “saw her as a woman, not an icon.” Ryan, meanwhile, portrayed probably the worst onscreen mother of the year and joked that people ask her if she has children after this movie, “and when I tell them no, they look relieved.”

Page has been over-interviewed about Juno, so there were few revelations to share about her process or the end result, but she did laugh about her envy of Juno’s pregnant breasts because, “They’d be nice, um, to have.” She insisted the movie’s preg-o subject matter was actually “a location for a film about growing up, about family,” not to fuel the abortion debate. Her one cool reveal was that the Moldy Peaches song, “Anyone Else But You,” which appears in the movie and actually concludes it as a duet by Juno and her baby’s daddy, Bleeker, was suggested entirely by her. It was a song, “that had been in my life for years,” and introduced to the character when director Jason Reitman asked if Page had any ideas what Juno might listen to.

In the end, the night’s greatest significance, all agreed, was that this Oscar class of 2008 actually got time to spend together despite the diminished awards-season hoopla brought on by the writer’s strike. For film lovers, it was just a chance to hear tomorrow’s legends talk about their work before James Lipton sinks his claws into them.

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