German Film Awards.

The German Film Awards ceremony has just drawn to a close in Berlin and, after several days spent countering severe criticism, Günter Rohrbach, president of the German Film Academy, has got to be glad the media spotlight will be moving along now. More on that in a moment, but first, the winners.

Vier Minuten (Four Minutes), directed by Chris Kraus, has won Best Film (Gold) and another Lola (every film award needs a cute name), Best Actress - for Monica Bleibtreu (yes, Moritz's mother, whom he thanked last year when he won a Silver Bear at the Berlinale).

Two Silver Lolas for Best Film go to Wer früher stirbt ist länger tot (Whoever Dies Early is Dead Longer) and Das Parfum, the one you'll have heard of, Tom Tykwer's Perfume: The Story of a Murderer.

Länger tot won three more: Best Director (Marcus H Rosenmüller), Best Screenplay (Rosenmüller and Christian Lerch) and Best Score (Gerd Baumann). Perfume picked up the most Lolas of the evening, six in all. The other five: Best Cinematography (Frank Griebe), Best Editing (Alexander Berner), Best Set Design (Uli Hanisch), Best Costumes (Pierre-Yves Gayraud) and Best Sound Design (a lot of people).

Best Documentary: Michael Glawogger's Workingman's Death.

Best Children's Film: Detlev Buck's Hände weg von Mississippi (Hands Off Mississippi).

Best Actor: Josef Bierbichler for Winterreise.

Best Supporting Actress: Hannah Herzsprung for Das Wahre Leben (Real Life).

Best Supporting Actor: Devid Striesow for Die Fälscher (The Counterfeiters).

So congrats to all the winners and nominees. Go party; the rest of us will be arguing behind your backs over how you wound up with those gold and silver statues. There's money attached to these prizes: Nearly 3 million euros in total, about $4 million. Public funds, no less. So Rohrbach can't have been surprised by all the scrutinizing, the generally rough ride the German papers have been giving him recently. It's just what German papers do, and more power to them.

The bigger surprise is that some filmmakers have voiced concern as well, a few of them rather loudly: Fatih Akin, Andres Veiel and, loudest of all, Hans Weingärtner, who's told Die Zeit that the whole "mass voting procedure makes it extremely hard for radically, artistically innovative films." In other words, who should be receiving public funding, starving artists with fresh voices or well-fed veterans like Perfume producer Bernd Eichinger?

Rohrbach counters that voters are filmmakers themselves - the 900 or so members of the Academy. "This makes the Award more important than it would be if you knew that they were somehow selected by a few friendly people who strive not to hurt anyone," he's told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. In other words, the Academy's award ought to carry more weight than one handed out by some festival jury. It's a strange argument, considering that even an award as commercially crass as the Oscar is also given to winners by their peers. And those winners will see a financial boon, yes - but no American tax dollars.

Therein lies the rub. Jan Schulz-Ojala argues in Der Tagesspiegel that the system has turned the Academy into a self-service free-for-all in which the primary aim of the game is to divvy up the 3 million amongst themselves. Weingärtner has proposed allowing the current voting system to carry on, hand out the awards without the money, which would then be funneled to those "innovative" projects - how and by whom are still presumably open questions.

But die taz would know where to begin. "The best films," they argue, "haven't even been nominated because the Academy's selection process doesn't take aesthetic quality into consideration." These are the films the Academy's looked over, the ones they recommend catching if you can: Falscher Bekenner (I Am Guilty), Am Rand der Städte (On the Outskirts), Montag kommen die Fenster (Windows on Monday), Die Quereinsteigerinnen (um... Switching Careers might work), Sehnsucht (Longing), Lucy, Aus der Ferne (From a Distance) and Sommer '04 (Summer '04).

Update, 5/7: Martin Blaney talks with Vier Minuten director Chris Kraus for Cineuropa.

Posted by dwhudson at May 4, 2007 2:52 PM