LOS ANGELES – In less than a week, journalists, movie stars and a handful of independent filmmakers will fall upon Park City, Utah, like buzzards on carrion, making deals, collecting swag and occasionally even watching movies.

Yup, the Sundance Film Festival is coming, bringing with it the obligatory charges that Robert Redford’s baby has become too commercial, too Hollywood and too obsessed with the vagaries of minor celebrity at the expense of the glorification of cinema.

– Zap2it.com

What better time, then, for Redford himself to show up at the Television Critics Association press tour to chat about the Sundance Channel and its much maligned older sibling.

“The festival is what it always has been,” Redford insists. “It gets looked at from different angles. And if somebody reads that different angle and it’s not the one we’re doing, they’re going to think, oh, it’s gone Hollywood. I don’t think that’s happened. I think Hollywood is just taking films from the festival because they realize they have worth.”

Redford knows, of course, that the Festival has its critics. Peter Biskind, in fact, wrote an entire book – “Down and Dirty Pictures : Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film” – that very nearly dubbed the “Ordinary People” Oscar winner as the indie film equivalent of Stalin.

“I would never be arrogant enough to … ignore any criticism,” Redford swears. “I take heart in some criticism and ignore others when I feel the criticism is coming from an unfounded place.”

Redford says the festival’s programmers still have the same strategies they had 20 years ago and that all of the dollars flowing down Main Street have only altered one aspect of what Sundance is about.

“Once it started to roll and you had the success of films like “Sex, Lies, and Videotape’ and other films, then suddenly more people began to come,” Redford says. “Then the merchants came. When the merchants came, then the celebrities came and the actors came, the talent came. Then the paparazzi came, and then the fashion came. And it’s like a pebble being dropped in a pond, but these ripples come out.”

He continues, “And when a media person comes in and looks at the festival, but from an outer tier, they’re going to see a completely different picture than the one we’re programming. They’ll think it’s about Paris Hilton, which is not about anything.”

The Sundance Film Festival runs from Jan. 19-29. In all, the festival will screen a total of 120 feature films including 84 world premieres, 18 North American premieres, and 15 U.S. premieres with 48 first-time feature filmmakers.