Keep Your Movies. I’ll Take Cinema!

Order Jamie Glazov’s new book, ‘United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny, Terror, and Hamas’: HERE.

It’s awards season in movieland. The Golden Globes were on January 12, followed by the Directors Guild Awards on February 7. Still ahead: the BAFTAs on February 22, the SAG Awards on March 1, and the Writers Guild Awards on March 8. And finally the big daddy of them all, the Oscars, on March 15.

No, the motion-picture industry’s product isn’t what it used to be. Netflix has all but taken it over, churning out offerings so forgettable that, scrolling through its current catalogue, you can decide to give something a chance only to realize, a couple of minutes into it, that you watched an hour of it a month ago before giving up.

As for good, old-fashioned movie theaters, hardly anybody goes to them any more except to see Tom Cruise hanging onto a jet in midflight or to treat the kiddies to the latest entry in some cartoon franchise. Meanwhile almost all of the so-called “serious” feature-film fare is drenched with self-righteous, left-wing political messaging.

It’s these films that win the bulk of the awards nowadays. Which is why the viewership figures for the awards shows keep dropping. Yet the shows keep on coming, year after year.

And this year, I actually saw a new one.

Well, new to me. The European Film Awards (EFA) have been around since 1988, but they stayed off my radar until very recently, when I ran across a reference to them someplace. Curious, I searched the Internet unsuccessfully for a video of this year’s ceremony, which took place on January 17, then was able to secure a private link via a helpful publicist.

I’m glad I did, because I quickly realized, while watching this three-hour spectacular, that there’s something important missing from the Oscars and all those other film-awards shows. Yes, they’re rich in vanity and virtue-signaling, but compared to the EFA they’re drastically low on one attribute that made the EFA feel like an almost entirely different experience: namely, pretentiousness.

At the EFA, there was no red carpet. There were no expensive gowns and jewelry. While the Oscars ceremony is held these days at the Dolby Theater, a glitzy movie house in Hollywood, this year’s EFA gala took place at the pretentiously named Haus der Kulturen der Welt (the House of World Cultures).

The Oscars show is traditionally hosted by a comedian who kicks off the show with a joke-filled monologue. The EFAs, this time around, were hosted by Scottish-Irish filmmaker Mark Cousins, who wore a kilt that didn’t do anything for him – and definitely was not meant for laughs – and who got things rolling with a breathtakingly pretentious monologue about “the cinema.”

After showing a brief film clip, Cousins, in the manner of a film-school lecturer, asked the audience: “What just happened there, on the big screen?” Dramatic pause. “Cinema happened. No art form can jump between worlds like cinema can….I’m here tonight to ask the question, with all of us who work in cinema: why do we love it so much?”

Never in my life have I heard the word “cinema” so many times in such a short period. And this was just the beginning. Later Cousins offered up this enigmatic apothegm: “Silence is a participation in darkness.” Still later, while showing water-related clips from a couple of film classics (e.g., Hedy Lamarr swimming in Ekstase – although, unsurprisingly, he referred to her by her birth name, Hedy Kiesler), Cousins commented: “Maybe we in cinema are like these people in water.”

He didn’t elaborate, which was probably for the best.

Anyway, on to the awards. The structure was basically the same as at the Oscars, only with added touches that made the Oscars, by comparison, seem lightning-fast. Each new segment began with a disembodied (and rather creepy) voice saying, for example, “Calling in from Denmark, this is Trine Dyrholm,” and then introducing the presenter and giving the latter’s credits. Some segments were even preceded by the solemn display of some item relevant to the award category: prior to Best Costume Design, somebody brought onstage what was described as a “sacred object,” namely a hat once worn by Marlene Dietrich.

I’ll mention just a few of the awards. First Feature Film went to On Falling, directed by Laura Carrera of Portugal, which, as the presenter explained, is about the “mind-numbing effects of late capitalism” – or, as Carrera put it herself, about the “relentless and dehumanizing expansion of neoliberalism.” Get out the popcorn! 

The European Young Audience Award, chosen by the young cineastes of Europe, was presented by an excessively bubbly youthful trio from the UK, Italy, and Turkey. Although the whole three hours was technically something of a mess, I was shocked by the extraordinary awkwardness of the direction, staging, and scripting of this particular segment.

While proffering inane cliches about the magic of the cinematic experience (“I step into the film and the film steps into me,” gushed the Turkish girl), the three young presenters had been directed to meander around the stage and up and down the aisles, repeatedly addressing one another by name in a way that was so painfully contrived that even the audience laughed and one of the presenters shrugged and nodded in embarrassment. The camerawork was bizarre, too, complete with Dutch angles, moments of shaky hand-held shooting, and startling cuts between exceedingly wide shots and tight close-ups. And this was, let’s remember, a program celebrating great filmmaking.

At the EFAs, as at the Academy Awards, there was politics – and of precisely the same sort. If anything, Gaza loomed even larger than at the Oscars. The “In Memoriam” segment, otherwise strictly limited to Europeans, included several “Palestinians.” Two of the nominees for Best Short Film were Palestine-related. At least one winner ended her acceptance speech with a tribute to the victims of “genocide” in Gaza.

We were 28 minutes in when the Polish presenter of the award for production design made a joke about Trump. She warned beforehand that it might not make sense in English, and it didn’t, but it got a big hand anyway. Another Trump reference came in 87-year-old Liv Ullmann’s rambling speech accepting her Lifetime Achievement Prize, in which she said that the world now is “out of our understanding,” the chief evidence of which was that this year’s Nobel peace laureate handed her award medal to Trump, an action that, Ullmann insisted humorlessly, is simply not permitted under the rules of the Norwegian Nobel Committee.

Given that Ullmann’s speech was meant to be an international star’s rehash of her entire life and career, Ullmann’s preoccupation with the trivial issue of Trump getting María Corina Machado’s medal was weird. “We are learning,” pronounced Ullmann at the end of her speech, “that there are no ‘the others’ in this world” – with the exception, of course, of MAGA voters. (Joachim Trier, accepting Best Director award for Sentimental Value, echoed Ullmann: “The other is not our enemy.” Is this this year’s vapid slogan?)

I’ve mentioned Ullmann’s humorlessness. Pretty much nothing in this whole show was intentionally humorous. If the producers of the Oscars ceremony at least strive to make parts of it amusing, the producers of the EFAs take the whole thing very, very seriously. Funerals are funnier. The biggest laugh in this year’s show was entirely unintentional: after Ullmann spent much of her speech developing the conceit that today’s filmmakers are the descendants of the Germanic peoples who carved runes onto stones many centuries ago, the Italian director Alice Rohrwacher, who won for Achievement in World Cinema, thought that Ullmann had been talking not about runes but about ruins, and, praising the analogy, dithered on about archeology. Well, that’s what you get when you try to do one show in a dozen or more languages. (Another Italian winner spent most of her acceptance speech wondering aloud, in both Italian and English, which of the two languages she should speak in.)

All in all, the European Film Awards show was a well-nigh perfect combination of the amateurish and the pretentious. In place of the glitzy superficiality of the Oscars, there was a kind of weird, creepy Kafkaesque quality. (Forced to choose, I’ll pick the former.) On a few occasions, random-seeming words were projected in white onto a black wall, as in some art-gallery installation. Indeed, there was a lot of performance-art silliness on display here – one horribly bad idea after another. At one point the audience was informed that, in the seat pocket in front of each of them, there was a raw potato, a gift from the director Agnès Varda. This was meant to symbolize something – I forget what. Who cares?

So much for the pretentious. On to the amateurish. When Varda was presenting a documentary award, she said: “There’s somebody in front of the prompter.” Often the cameramen seemed to be asleep. The presenters and winners were all encouraged to speak in their own languages, but the English subtitling was consistently terrible. More than at any other awards show I’ve ever seen, the people onstage talked about how nervous they were.

Then there was the unforgettable moment when the president of the European Film Academy, Juliette Binoche, exclaimed dramatically: “I’ve never felt as European than being with you all tonight!” Meaning what? Meaning nothing, naturally. Almost nothing here meant anything. It was all just a bunch of windy nonsense.

And then there was the elephant in the room. In all, dozens of films were nominated for these awards, and their storylines briefly outlined, with representative clips included. By the end of the show, one thing seemed clear: while some of the movies celebrated here address Gaza, Ukraine, Third World poverty, and, as noted, the “mind-numbing effects of late capitalism,” not one of them is remotely honest about Europe’s real problems. Which, needless to say, is tragically typical of European culture in the year 2026 – or, on the Arabic calendar, 1447.