In more awards news, Jacques Audiard’s very impressive French prison film feature, “A Prophet” (“Un Prophete”) completely dominated the French Oscar Awards (The Césars Awards) this weekend. The film’s lead Tahar Rahim, actually won two awards for Best Actor and Best Newcomer as well. And the picture took home almost every award known to man including Best Picture, Director etc. Good for Audiard (“The Beat That My Heart Skipped,” “Read My Lips”), it’s a fantastic and engrossing picture for the most part (we had some issues, but not enough to derail it).
So does this mean the picture is a shoo-in for the Foreign Film category at the Oscars since it also won the runner-up prize at Cannes and several other major awards over the months?
Unfortunately not, the Foreign Film branch generally have their heads squarely up their asses and usually don’t care about the buzz and awards. Take last year. Everyone assumed the highly lauded and unanimously praised, “Waltz With Bashir” would win the award, but instead the incredibly treacly and goo-ily overwrought “Departures” from Japan won the award. That film was near insufferable in its sentimentality, but it won the Best Foreign Oscar regardless. They play it safe and conservative in this category so keep that in mind.
We called “A Prophet” a “gripping, gritty” and intense prison/crime/gangster saga which is true and this writer in particular thought it should have won the Palme d’Or over the more clinical and rigidly formalist “The White Ribbon” by Michael Haneke.
The film won a whopping nine awards.The full winners are below.
But, on a side note, we’re especially happy to hear that Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea’s “L’enfer d’Henri-Georges Clouzot,” won the best documentary prize. You can read about it more in detail here, but it’s one of our favorite documentaries of the last few years.
It’s endlessly fascinating if you’re a cinephile and centers on the aborted attempt by French horror master Henri-Georges Clouzot’s (France’s Hitchcock contemporary in the ’40s and ’50s) attempt to make his would-be psychedelic, experimental masterpiece, “L’enfer” and how his crippling obsession with the details ultimately destroyed the film from ever being made (production was eventually shut down after myriad complications). If you are somehow unfamiliar with Clouzot’s striking work (“Le Corbeau,” “Diabolique,” “The Wages of Fear” which was remade as “Sorcerer” by William Friedkin in the last ’70s), run, do not walk to your local video store. Hopefully the documentary will hit U.S. theaters later this year. Canadian distributors Films We Like have picked up the film for those of you north of the border, and it will make the arthouse rounds this spring. Click here for the schedule of upcoming screenings. The trailer for it and “Un Prophete” are below.
* Best Film : UN PROPHETE
* Best Director : Jacques Audiard for UN PROPHETE
* Best Actor : Tahar Rahim for UN PROPHETE
* Best Actress : Isabelle Adjani for LA JOURNEE DE LA JUPE
* Best Sup. Actor : Niels Arestrup for UN PROPHETE
* Best Sup. Actress : Emmanuelle Devos for A L’ORIGINE
* Best Promising Actor : Tahar Rahim for UN PROPHETE
* Best Promising Actress : Mélanie Thierry for LE DERNIER POUR LA ROUTE
* Best First Film : LES BEAUX GOSSES
* Best Original Screenplay : UN PROPHETE
* Best Adapted Screenplay : MADEMOISELLE CHAMBON
* Best Music : LE CONCERT
* Best Sound : LE CONCERT
* Best Art Direction : UN PROPHETE
* Best Costume : COCO AVANT CHANEL
* Best Cinematography : UN PROPHETE
* Best Editing : UN PROPHETE
* Best Foreign Film : GRAN TORINO
* Best Documentary : L’ENFER DE HENRI-GEORGES CLOUZOT