Tickets are now on sale for the 2019 College of Communication and Fine Arts’ Distinguished Achievement Award for the Creative and Performing Arts. This year’s recipient is Tom Shadyac, the renowned screenwriter, author, producer and director of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, The Nutty Professor, Liar Liar, Patch Adams, and Bruce Almighty who was named filmmaker in residence in the Department of Communication and Film in 2015.

Shadyac will be honored from 5:30 to 7 p.m. on April 2 at the Fogelman Executive Conference Center on the U of M campus.

That’s a long lead-in to this: 5 reasons why you should buy tickets to the 2019 Distinguished Achievement Award:

1. It’s honoring Tom Shadyac, who The Commercial Appeal in 2017 described as being “among the world’s most successful filmmakers (from 1996 to 2007), directing and sometimes producing and writing comedies with such stars as Eddie Murphy (The Nutty Professor, a remake of the Jerry Lewis classic) and Jim Carrey (Ace Ventura: Pet Detective) that collected close to $2 billion in box-office receipts worldwide.”

That says nothing of Brian Banks, the recent movie Shadyac shot in Memphis that Variety called “a well-meaning and emotionally engaging movie about the California Innocence Project’s incredible battle to exonerate a Long Beach football player who lost 11 years of his life to prison and parole after a high school classmate falsely accused him of rape.” Or I Am, the introspective documentary Shadyac created after he suffered a serious cycling accident in 2007 and re-dedicated his life to philanthropy and other people-centered endeavors.

2. Shadyac loves the U of M (and the city of Memphis). Seriously. He adores the U of M. “I have found a depth, an authenticity, and a light in the students that I have not seen in my many years of teaching,” Shadyac told The Daily Helmsman in 2015. “They are a unique student body that is committed to serving with whatever talents they have, and I never leave my class with anything but a high of inspiration.”

3. Have you ever heard a Tom Shadyac speech?

4. Tickets are only $30. You can buy them here.

5. It’s at the U of M. What more do you need? See you there.

— Phillip Tutor, CCFA media coordinator, potutor@memphis.edu