France’s Oscars, the César Awards, are being given out tonight in the Théâtre du Châtelet (as they have been since 2002), a Haussmannian hulk which predates the cinema by more than three decades and which is now a classical-music hall. The arches, columns, and carvings serve both as an aspirational model to the cinema—be classical, be art!—and as a warning: France and its culture were already grand and mature when the cinema was born there, and the cinema was born not in a void of capitalistic bustle but on the shoulders of a giant world of art.
In other words, the awards seem a little superfluous in a place that offers movie prizes on the model of book awards. The Louis Delluc Prize, for the best film of the year, is named after a crucial critic of the twenties and, if it doesn’t always go to the cream of the cream, the honor has done a pretty good job of skimming it: films by Jean-Luc Godard, Jean Cocteau, Agnès Varda, François Truffaut, Maurice Pialat, Robert Bresson, Jacques Tati, Eric Rohmer, Alain Resnais, Leos Carax, Philippe Garrel, Raúl Ruiz, Raymond Depardon, Jean Rouch, Claude Chabrol, and Jacques Becker have all won. Its first recipient, in 1937, was Jean Renoir. And for the young filmmaker, there is the Jean Vigo Prize, founded in 1951: Godard got it for his first feature, “Breathless”; Chabrol got it for his, “Le Beau Serge”; Resnais won for “Night and Fog,” Ousmane Sembène for “Black Girl.” Jacques Rozier (not in the first flush of biological youth but amazingly free-spirited) won for “Maine-Océan,” and Alain Guiraudie (recently the subject of a well-deserved retrospective at Film Society of Lincoln Center) won for “That Old Dream That Moves.”
These long lists of notables (despite omissions such as Chantal Akerman, Jacques Rivette, and Jean Eustache) suggest all the more why the Césars—first given in 1976, under the aegis of France’s own Academy, which, in turn, is governed by an association composed principally of France’s Oscar winners—seem to be playing catch-up in a milieu where stardom and celebrity have a more equivocal role in the self-image of the local movie world. But, of course, unlike the Delluc and Vigo prizes, the Césars go to movie artists in all categories, offering France, too, a welcome chance to pit actors against actors and technicians against technicians.
So let’s take a look at this year’s nominees to see whether they live up to their historic responsibility. I haven’t seen many of the films on the various lists (many haven’t yet been shown here), but there are three extraordinary movies up for Best Picture: Abdellatif Kechiche’s “Blue Is the Warmest Color,” Arnaud Desplechin’s “Jimmy P.: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian,” and Guiraudie’s “Stranger by the Lake.” France’s candidate for the Best Foreign-Language Film Oscar, “Renoir,” isn’t on the list. (It’s up for two major awards, Best Actor and Best Cinematography.)
The Best Foreign Film list includes seven films, three of which are American (“Blue Jasmine,” “Django Unchained,” and “Gravity”); two are on the Oscar list in the same category (“The Broken Circle Breakdown” and “The Great Beauty”); it also includes the Spanish film “Blancanieves” and the Belgian film “Dead Man Talking.”
The biggest surprise on the list is in the Best Actress category, where Léa Seydoux, one of the two actresses at the center of “Blue Is the Warmest Color,” but not the one with the bulk of the screen time, is a nominee. Her co-star, Adèle Exarchopoulos, was passed over, even though the French title of the film, “La Vie d’Adèle, Chapitres 1 & 2,” makes express reference to Exarchopoulos’s character. She, however, makes an appearance elsewhere in the nominations.
The biggest difference between the Oscars and the Césars is that France’s awards have special categories for newcomers—Best First Film and Most Promising Actor and Actress (literally, “Meilleur Espoir Masculin / Féminin”: Best Hope)—and that’s where Exarchopoulos has been nominated. Pierre Deladonchamps, of “Stranger by the Lake,” has been nominated in the male category, as has Vincent Macaigne, the actor who has played leading roles in many of the key films of the rising generation of French filmmakers. His nomination is for his unstrung role in Antonin Peretjatko’s giddily inventive comedy “La Fille du 14 Juillet”—here called “The Rendez-Vous of Déja Vu”—which is also one of the five Best First Film nominees, along with Justine Triet’s “La Bataille de Solférino” (“Age of Panic”), also co-starring Macaigne, which the Film Society of Lincoln Center will screen in March as part of its Rendez-Vous with French Cinema. It should not be missed.
In the Best Documentary category, Claude Lanzmann’s “The Last of the Unjust,” absurdly left out of the Oscar selection, is one of the five nominees.
There are a few differences: the Césars don’t distinguish between Sound Mixing and Sound Editing; they have a unified prize for Best Sound. There’s only one short-film prize, which doesn’t distinguish between live action, animation, and documentary. Also, because few French films come in near the top of the French box-office results, the César nominations, while not allergic to hits, take a surprisingly broad view of the year’s offerings. The art of the cinema in France has been distinctive from the start; its business is distinctive, too. French movies have been in the midst of a flowering of youth, and the business of that inventive new cinema is based, as here, on the pioneering audacity of independent productions (such as Triet and Peretjatko’s films, both of which were produced by Emmanuel Chaumet, who, in a recent interview, explains his shoestring, debt-riddled methods). Their presence among the year’s César nominees is all to the good.
The ceremonies begin at 9 P.M. local time, 3 P.M. (Eastern). I’ll report back.
Photograph of Léa Seydoux by Patrick Aventurier/Getty.
