César du Cinéma 2006
by Andre Soares
The winners of the French equivalent to the Oscars, the Prix César 2006, will be announced on Feb. 25 at a ceremony held at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris. Best Actress Nominee Valérie Lemercier (Palais royal!) will act as Master of Ceremony.
The nominees for Best French Film at the 31st edition of the César Awards are Jacques Audiard’s Bafta Award-winning (Best Foreign-Language Film) psychological drama De battre, mon coeur s’est arrêté / The Beat That My Heart Skipped, which garnered ten nominations including one for Best Actor (Romain Duris); Christian Carion’s Joyeux Noël / Merry Christmas (which has been nominated for the Best Foreign-Language Film Academy Award), with six nominations; Xavier Beauvois’s Le Petit lieutenant, with four nominations; Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne’s Palm d’Or winner L’Enfant / The Child, with three nods; and Radu Mihaileanu’s Va, vis et deviens / Go, See and Become, with four nominations.
A History of Violence, Mar adentro / The Sea Inside, Match Point, Million Dollar Baby, and Walk on Water are the four nominees in the Best Foreign Film category. (The Best European Film category is no more.)
Michael Haneke’s excellent Caché / Hidden received four nominations, including two for Haneke for Direction (taking Christian Carion’s spot) and Original Screenplay. Curiously - and unfairly - Haneke’s psychological mystery failed to receive a Best French Film nod, or nominations for its two leads, Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche, or for supporting player Annie Girardot.
In the Best First Film category, there are two documentaries that have received Academy Award nominations: Luc Jacquet’s La Marche de l’empereur / March of the Penguins and Hubert Sauper’s Le Cauchemar de Darwin / Darwin’s Nightmare.
Among those films ignored by the French Academy were François Ozon’s Le Temps qui reste, Arnaud Larrieu and Jean-Marie Larrieu’s well-received comedy Peindre ou faire l’amour, and Claude Berri’s L’Un reste, l’autre part.
Note: Among the Best French Films are the very international Joyeux Noël, the co-production L’Enfant - directed by Belgians - and Va, vis et deviens, directed by a Romanian and set in Israel. Caché is also a co-production, with Austria and other countries.
List of the British Academy of Film 2006 nominees
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“Joyeux Noel”, is a fairly accurate documentation of the Christmas Truce of 1914. My grandfather, who was drafted to serve in the German army, was one of the participants. In his sector, it began with an exchange of rations. Since the trenches were close enough to throw grenades at each other, one of the “enemy” asked if the Germans wanted to trade food for cigarettes. Both sides ultimately climbed out of their trenches to celebrate Christmas together, until the officers on both sides forced them to fight again.