European Film Awards. You've Always Wanted to Visit Malta, Right?

Each year the European Film Awards move to a different location and this year for their 25th anniversary they'll be in Malta. If you vote on their Audience Award prize starting September 1st (today!) you become eligible to win a trip to the ceremony on December 1st (today in 3 months!). Voting closes at the end of October.

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The audience prize nominees, an eclectic bunch, are...

• THE ARTIST (france -- last year's best picture winner)
• BARBARA (germany -- Germany's official submission for the upcoming Oscars)
• THE BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL (uk)
• CAESAR MUST DIE (italy)
• HASTA LA VISTA/COME AS YOU ARE (belgium)
• HEADHUNTERS (norway) 
• IN DARKNESS (poland - oscar foreign film nominee 2011)
• INTOUCHABLES (france)
• THE IRON LADY (uk - oscar best actress winner)
• SALMON FISHING IN THE YEMEN (uk)
• SHAME (uk)
• TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY (france, uk, germany)

I'm baffled about the inclusion of The Iron Lady as it certainly doesn't fit any "crowd pleaser" definition previously known to man. Unless by crowd you mean the entire population of StreepStanistan. Obviously in any "people's choice" situation the film that has been the most widely seen has the edge, so this prize is probably going to The Intouchables ($363 million globally) given its global phenom status. The Artist ($133 million globally), and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel ($131 million globally) look like the only possible spoilers.

Lest you dismiss the European Film Awards outright through headscratching over this particular list, please to remember that it's only their audience prize. Their regular nominations don't arrive until early November. Last year they were the only awards body to give the great Melancholia multiple statues.

In related Ocean-Crossing news, The Oscar Foreign Film Submission Charts are now up to detail the official Academy submissions as well as rumors of which films might compete:

• ALBANIA thru ISRAEL - one official submission thus far, one official finalist list, a few rumors
• ITALY thru VIETNAM - one official submission thus far, some rumors

Euro Film Award Winners

While American film critics circles orgs and associations prep their year end "best" reveals, let's hop overseas for a moment. The European Film Awards were held in Berlin, Germany yesterday. It was a very good day to be Danish.

Though Mads Mikkelsen (left) is often seen in American and British films he frequently headlines Danish films too and was honored with a world cinema tribute. Lars von Trier, the maddest prince of Denmark since Hamlet, won the top prize for Melancholia. Though von Trier lost Best Director, he lost it to fellow Dane Susanne Bier who recently also won the Oscar (Best Foreign Language Film, In A Better World.) All three were born within a nine year span in Copenhagen!

FILM Melancholia (Lars von Trier)
DOCUMENTARY Pina (Wim Wenders)
ANIMATED FEATURE Chico & Rita (Tono Erranda, Javier Mariscal & Fernando Trueba)
EUROPEAN ACHIEVEMENT WORLD CINEMA Mads Mikkelsen
LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT Stephen Frears
DIRECTOR Susanne Bier, A Better World
ACTRESS Tilda Swinton, We Need To Talk About Kevin
ACTOR Colin Firth, The King's Speech
SCREENWRITER Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, The Kid With The Bike 
EDITOR Tariq Anwar, The King's Speech
PRODUCTION DESIGNER Jette Lehmann, Melancholia
CINEMATOGRAPHER Manuel Albert Caro, Melancholia
COMPOSER Ludovic Bource, The Artist
PEOPLE'S CHOICE The King's Speech
SHORT FILM AWARD The Wholly Family (Terry Gilliam)
EUROPEAN DISCOVERY  Oxygen (Hans Van Nuffel)

Stars at the EFA Awards from left to right: Sibel Kekilli & Elyas M'Barek, Ludivine Sagnier, Terry Gilliam, (second row) Moritz Bleibtreu, Sam Riley & Alexandra Maria Lara and Maria De Medeiros

Congratulations to the winners!

Another prize for Tilda, eh? If Best Actress weren't so jam-packed this year -- I'll update the two week old charts tomorrow -- I'd be starting to believe that a second Oscar nomination could follow. But whether or not Oscar traction happens, there's definitely a Swintonian Love Wave happening.  Such is the power of momentum. Three consecutive critically lauded star turns in acclaimed challenging films (Julia + I Am Love + We Need To Talk About Kevin) will do that to a girl.

European Award Noms (Shades of Oscar, 2011 AND 2010)

Our Oscar chart updates are underway (much more coming at you tomorrow) and now The European Film Award nominations are out. The Film Experience always enjoys their attempt at boiling down so many countries into one group of "best of"s. The American and British Film Academies don't have it so hard, you know, each generally only dealing with the best of Hollywood and London with the occasional embassy outreach to a hot foreigner. (That'd be The Artist this year).

Melancholia vs. The Artist at the EFAs

For our Oscar discussion purposes the most amusing thing about this year's lineup is that two Oscar winners from 2010 (the UK's The Kings Speech and Denmark's In a Better World) are competing against one of the presumed frontrunners of 2011 (France's The Artist) with a few arthouse madman (The Melancholia) and French language side dishes (The Kid With a Bike -- not submitted for this year's Oscar race -- and Le Havre, which is an Oscar submission for in Best Foreign Film).

FILM

• The Artist
• Le Havre
• In a Better World
• The Kid With a Bike
• The King's Speech 
• Melancholia

Sigh. The King's Speech. At this point it's like an unstaked British vampire, sucking the life from Gallic beauties and crazy Danes. 

DIRECTOR

• Susanne Bier, In a Better World
• The Dardenne Brothers, The Kid With a Bike
• Aki Kaurismäki, Le Havre
• Béla Tarr, The Turin Horse
• Lars von Trier, Melancholia

It seems absolutlely bizarre to snub Michael Hazanavicius for direction (The Artist, more than most movies, would've been a disaster without its careful but exuberant guiding hand). Meanwhile Tom Hooper probably won't lose sleep over his snubbing here. Once you've won the Oscar...

ACTRESS

• Kirsten Dunst, Melancholia
• Cécile de France, The Kid With a Bike
• Charlotte Gainsbourg, Melancholia
• Nadezdha Markina, Elena
• Tilda Swinton, We Need To Talk About Kevin

Melancholia's sisters (Dunst & Gainsbourg) each get half the movie. They also share the EFA nom.

We're literally revisiting Cannes jury deliberations for this lineup since all of the women were there. Remember when everyone was all: will it be Kiki or Tilda in "Best Actress"? I wish the EFA had a higher profile just to give Dunst another boost and get back into the Oscar conversation.

More after the jump including actors, composers, and dreamy unsettling production design.

Click to read more ...

Vote on the Euro Film Awards (Plus: Oscar Submits)

While I normally approve not of "people's choice" awards -- that's what box office is for -- I do find the European Film Awards a curious beast worth noting each year. They have variety by way of scattershot film culture, there being no unifying "Hollywood" to control them. This year their People's Choice Awards -- which you can vote on and enter for a chance to win a trip to the awards in Berlin -- offers up an odd collection of Camp Comedy (France's star-laden Potiche), Royalty Porn (The UK's Oscar winner The King's Speech), Meta History (Spain's Even The Rain), Message Movie (Denmark's Oscar Winner In a Better World), Neeson-y Thriller (the international Unknown), Fish Out of Water Comedy (Italy's Welcome to the South), Ensemble Drama (France's star-laden Little White Lies), and even Animated Family Film (Germany's Animals United).

And the Nominees Are...

Go and vote...
...as long as you're not planning to help The King's Speech win yet more statues. Cinema-Gods help us all.

Meanwhile the Oscar Foreign Film submissions continue...

NORWAY
Anne Sewitsky’s debut Happy, Happy (Sykt lykkelig) which we've previously discussed (I heart the trailer) will represent the land of the midnight sun in this year's Oscar race. Previous awards under its belt include the Sundance Festival's World Cinema Jury Prize Dramatic which, if you'll recall, is the same prize that the great Australian feature Animal Kingdom got its first big boost from in 2010. Joachim Trier's Oslo August 31st is the loser in this Oscar scenario but here's hoping that both films get stateside distribution. 

HUNGARY
Bela Tarr's The Turin Horse will represent daring Hungary in this year's Oscar race. Hungary nearly always competes for Most Atypical Submitted Film which is bad for their nominatability but great for proof of variety in that odd annual Oscar survey of what's happening in international cinema. This one will need a helping hand from that special committee that Oscar dreamt up to basically force critical darlings on to the nominated shortlist. The new system obviously paid off last year for Greece's Dogtooth. Cinema Underground tells it like so...

Not since Alexander Sokurov’s The Second Circle have I watched a movie that felt so much more like physical endurance than an active intellectual and emotional experience... The Turin Horse is a punishing film.  The people in it are ugly and often cruel.  Their lives are repetitive and arduous.  There is little plot, little action, little change of scenery, but there are plenty of long, long takes in which no words are spoken.   

And that's from a somewhat positive review.

Oscar Foreign Film Pages