Gosford Park, Geraldine Somerville, ...
Image credit: Gosford Park: Mark Tillie

In other awards this weekend, the Cesars, France's equivalent of the Oscars, gave ''Amélie'' the Best Picture and Best Director awards but shut it out of the other 11 categories in which it was nominated. (The French named ''Mulholland Drive'' as Best Foreign Film; interestingly, it has been all but ignored by Oscar, except for David Lynch's Best Director nomination.) In the U.S., where ''Amélie'' is the highest grossing French film of all time, it's up for five Academy Awards, including Best Foreign Film and Best Original Screenplay. However, Harris says, this light comedy still faces stiff competition among foreign films; current events might lead voters to favor a more hard-hitting, politically minded nominee, like the Bosnian war satire ''No Man's Land.'' Harris adds, ''People who've seen Argentina's 'Son of the Bride' are enormously impressed by it. So the envelope could open and honor something we haven't seen here yet. Still, because 'Amelie' has earned all this money, it's the preemptive favorite.''

The weekend also revealed the names on some of this year's Oscar statuettes: Technical award winners were announced on Saturday night. Charlize Theron lent some glamour to the proceedings, where she handed out 25 Oscars for worthy but obscure achievements in such fields as camera design, sound recording, and especially CGI algorithms and software (Hotttt!). Theron, who has plenty of experience cozying up to dweeby but accomplished guys (she's acted opposite such romantic leads as Woody Allen, Jeff Daniels, and Tobey Maguire), had to smooch most of the winners, as is the custom. ''Just tell me if you don't want a kiss,'' she said to one winner, who seemed to balk. Well, the answer to her question is a lot easier to predict than anything else about the Oscars.

Originally posted Mar 04, 2002
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