AceShowbiz - French actress Marion Cotillard and director Quentin Tarantino are to receive the top honors at the upcoming Palm Springs Film Festival in California. Cotillard, who was previously feted at the event in 2008 for her role in "La Vie En Rose", will take home the best actress prize for her performance in movie-musical "Nine". Tarantino will be handed the Sonny Bono Visionary Award, named after the festival's founder, for his contribution to film.

A statement from festival chairman Harold Matzner reads, "Following a distinguished career in French cinema, Marion Cotillard has firmly established herself as a major actress in American films. Her performance in Rob Marshall's Nine is nothing short of breathtaking. Quentin Tarantino is one of the most gifted, iconoclastic film-makers of his generation, and with "Inglourious Basterds", he's created a hugely entertaining, revisionist take on history as it might have been."

British actress Helen Mirren is slated to pick up the coveted Career Achievement Award at the festival's gala prizegiving on January 5, 2010, at the Palm Springs Convention Center. The festival, which will run from January 5 - 18, 2010, was set up in 1990 by the city's then-Mayor, singer-songwriter Sonny Bono, who turned to politics before his death in 1998.