Mary J. Blige will receive the Breakthrough Performance Award at the 2018 Palm Springs International Film Festival’s Awards Gala, PSIFF organizers announced on Thursday.
Blige, who established herself as a Grammy-winning singer and songwriter before acting in films like “I Can Do Bad All by Myself” and “Rock of Ages,” will be honored for her performance in Dee Rees’ “Mudbound,” in which she plays the mother in a family of sharecroppers in rural Mississippi in the years before and after World War II.
In the past, the Breakthrough Performance Award has gone to Mahershala Ali, Marion Cotillard, Jennifer Hudson, Lupita Nyong’o, Rosamund Pike and Jeremy Renner, among others.
Blige will join fellow honorees Timothée Chalamet, Gal Gadot, Holly Hunter, Allison Janney, Gary Oldman, Sam Rockwell, Saoirse Ronan and the director and cast of “The Shape of Water” at the Palm Springs Convention Center on January 2, 2018.
The Awards Gala will take place at the beginning of the 29th annual festival, which will run through January 15 in the desert resort town east of Los Angeles.