Word: prize
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...prize at Cannes, the Palme d'Or, went for the first time in 21 years to a French film: Laurent Cantet's Entre les Murs (The Class), which traces a year in a Paris junior-high class. This judicious, quietly touching film was made with nonprofessional actors, including the teacher, François Bégaudeau, on whose memoir-novel the film is based. When the unanimous award was announced, Cantet, Bégaudeau and the rainbow coalition of kids all swarmed onstage for an ecstatic reunion...
Among the other laureled films were two from Italy: Matteo Garrone's remorseless Gomorrah (the Grand Prize, or second place), about a Mafia clan's reach throughout the country, and Paolo Sorrentino's Il Divo (the third-place Jury Prize), a snazzy-looking, corrosively cynical biopic of three-time Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti. When he was shown the film before Cannes, Andreotti called it "the act of a scoundrel." After Il Divo won its prize, he took the longer view. "For anybody in politics, it seems to me, to be ignored is worse than to be criticized," he said, adding...
European films snagged most of the main awards. The Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne were given the Screenplay prize for their immigrant crime drama The Silence of Lorna, and Nuri Bilge Ceylan, from Turkey, was named Best Director (a consolation prize here) for Three Monkeys, his study of corruption within a business and a family. The Best Actress award went to Sandra Corveloni, who played a pregnant single mother trying to keep her poor family together in the Brazilian Linha de passe (Line of Passage). Only one U.S. picture was fêted: Benicio Del Toro was named...
...showing at Cannes has little impact. In 1991, Joel and Ethan Coen's Barton Fink received an unprecedented three top awards (Palme d'Or, Best Director and, for John Turturro, Best Actor) but grossed only $6 million stateside; last year, the Coens' No Country for Old Men got no prize at Cannes, then earned nearly $75 million on domestic screens (plus $86 million abroad), and won the brothers three Oscars, including for Best Picture. Such Academy-nominated hits as L.A. Confidential and Eastwood's Mystic River also got snubbed on the Côte d'Azur; and Brokeback Mountain...
...best omen for the future of Synecdoche, New York: at Cannes, it won no prize...