The media here is filled with the great news of Japan's huge success at tonight's Academy Awards, which are still in progress.
Departures (Okuribito, 『おくりびと』) has won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film! I honestly wasn't sure if it (or any film in the category) would be able to top Waltz With Bashir. A huge congratulations to my friends at both TBS (who produced the film) and Shochiku (who distributed the film and handled foreign sales, closing the US deal with Regent Releasing before ContentFilm took over). I've written a lot about Departures for Screen, culminating in an Oscar profile for our Feb 6 weekly, so it's great to see this all come to fruition.
The news is reporting that it's the first time ever for a Japanese film to win the award. Technically this is true, but both Rashômon and Samurai, The Legend of Musashi won honorary Academy Awards in the 1950s. See the entire list here.
See my collected Departures posts here.
Additionally, director Katô Kunio's La Maison en Petits Cubes (Tsumiki No Ie, 『つみきのいえ』) won the Oscar for Best Animated Short Film.
A great day for Japanese cinema!
5 comments:
Terrific news, and I was shocked to see it happen since it wasn't favored to win. Hopefully this will give the film a big push for its release here, and possibly help other high-profile Japanese films find some North American distribution. Two other notes: director Yojiro Takita started in pink films, so it's amazing for him to be standing on the Academy stage; he directed many of the CHIKAN DENSHA / MOLESTER TRAIN comedies. Secondly, did anybody else notice during the "in memoriam" segment, that they mis-identified actor Rentaro Mikuni as director Kon Ichikawa. They pulled the interview from the Criterion DVD of HARP OF BURMA.
I thought I'd leave the seijin eiga resume for the comments section -- it is quite remarkable. Kôtari Yûji (who played the husband in Snake of June) was commenting on Takita's background on one of the wide shows earlier. He said viewers might not understand "seijin eiga" so he changed it to "adult film".
Didn't see the broadcast itself as I can't justify subscribing to Wowow and sticking a dish on my balcony for one or two exclusives a year. Too bad about the Ichikawa mistake, though. They should've got someone like Nick to vet the clip.
Interesting to see some much of "Asian" taste in this years Oscar. In addition to "Okuribito", Slumdog Millionaire was VERY much featured...
I wrote a blog post about it, too, with some photo and interview update.
http://hogacentral.blogs.com/hoganews/2009/02/departures-the-first-oscar-crown-for-japanese-live-action-film.html
...it's a strange day to be british and a fan of films. glad departures won, happy the japanese short film entry also won, very glad danny boyle has done good. "trainspotting" and "28 days later" had a huge impact here - belatedly with the latter, but very much initially with the former - and there was a more underground / slight crossover appeal to "shallow grave" too... but i'm a little cynical that the slumdog effect is typical oscar stuff, and that the benefit of it being a cheap movie is that it's perhaps seen as compensating for the general sense that a modest film in hollywood costs twice it's budget.
perhaps "departures" shows good vfm? $3m for one oscar seems to somehow equate to the success of $15m and slumdog's 8 oscars, if not beating it because it's also a foreign film through and through.
i thought okuribito and tsumiki no ie winning were the best part of the oscars. it wasn't expected for okuribito but it was a nice surprise nonetheless. i truly hope this opens a lot more doors for asian movies to find distributions here in the states. there's nothing better than watching movies in the big theatrical screens!
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