It's one of those years where the great Atom Egoyan's contribution to cinema is totally insignificant (Adoration received 2 noms) and where Denis Villeneuve's Polytechnique, in my books the best Canadian film of the year, grabbed the high count total of eleven nominations for the 30th Genie Awards.
No surprises at the 35th Cesars, as A Prophet cleaned up in all major categories it was nominated in: Best Film, Best Director (Audiard), Best Original Screenplay, Best Cinematography (Stephane Fontaine), Best Editing (Juliette Welfling), Best Art Direction (Michel Barthelemy) and last but not least, one of my top 5 performance of the year, Niels Arestrup won for Best Supporting...
I spent all of last week divulging some of films that I expect to be in Cannes this year, and Screen Daily happened to do the same. There are a good number of films that are mentioned of both sites' lists, but I mention about twenty films that the trade makes no mention of, and of course they have got a long list as well of films that I either passed on as potential selections or I was totally oblivious as to their existence.
This year I've decided to not include titles that were introduced in 2009 and are having their theatrical release this year: they include top of the list we find A Prophet and Fish Tank, a pair of cream of the crop titles showcased in Cannes, and films such as Dogtooth, Hadewijch, Tales From the Golden Age, Father of My Children, City of Life and Death, I Killed My Mother (J'ai tue ma mere), Mother, Mother and Child, Lebanon, Micmacs à tire-larigot are all worthy titles to look out for.
Similar to the Golden Globes because it is a foreign group of film journalists who conduct the voting (though I'm sure they have no mandate to prefer films loaded in stars), this year's the 15th Lumiere Awards has a pair of films in the top tier that recently that duked it out for the Louis Delluc award. Philippe Lioret's Welcome (which just got picked up by Film Movement this week) and Jacques Audiard's A Prophet (a SPC release next February) received five and four noms respectively.