The winner is ‘The Great Beauty’: Italy won the 11th Oscar with Sorrentino

He got it. Director Paolo Sorrentino brought home the Academy Award for the best foreign language film. A glorious career for his “The Great Beauty” after the Golden Globe, the European Film Awards Efa, and the British Academy Film Awards Bafta.

 

In a tweet, Italian Premier Matteo Renzi said the win is a mark of “Italian pride”, reflecting the front page of every national daily newspaper. 

 

With this award, Italy has won its eleventh prize since foreign language film became a competitive category in 1956, the most ever for any country. The prize puts Italy two statuettes ahead of France’s nine foreign-Oscar wins, 15 years after Italy’s last Academy Award for Roberto Benigni’s Holocaust tragicomedy “Life Is Beautiful” in 1998.

At the 86th Academy Awards, the film beat Belgium’s melodrama “The Broken Circle Break-down”, Denmark’s “The Hunt”, premiered nearly two years ago at the 2012 Cannes Film festival, Cambodia’s first-person documentary “The Missing Picture”, and “Omar”, a procedural thriller from Palestine. This was a year where a record 76 films were entered for Foreign Language consideration.

 

“The Great Beauty”, a tribute to the great Italian master Federico Fellini and his muse Rome, the Eternal City, enchanted the jury with its magical and at times cynical romp through a Roman dreamscape. The film has been hailed for bringing out the city’s sumptuous beauty.

 

The film is about an aging writer’s reflections on life, provincial youth, unrequited love and a soulless Catholic Church unable to satisfy his search for a meaning in life among Rome’s idle rich. Opening on package-tour views of classical Italian architecture, the movie cuts abruptly to a screaming Roman disco party swarming with distorted glamour. The disorienting bacchanal is the 65th birthday party for the protagonist, a man named Jep Gambardella. The camera lands on the louche, implacable landscape of his face. The movie’s continuation through all-night parties and high-class affairs has reminded critics of Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita” in its portrayal of the Italian capital’s hedonistic haut monde. 

 

Sorrentino said, ahead of the Oscars, that in the film he wanted to contrast the visual beauty of Rome with the “people who don’t realize that this beauty is all around them”. 

 

The 65-year-old protagonist is played by Toni Servillo, a veteran of five Sorrentino movies. He appeared beside his fellow Naples native at the podium in Hollywood. In his acceptance speech at the Dolby theatre in Los Angeles, Sorrentino said: “Thank you to my inspiration, Federico Fellini, to Martin Scorsese, Diego Armando Maradona, and thank you to Roma, Napoli… and this is for my parents”.

 

Afterwards he explained: “I felt a sense of responsibility in the last days from my country because too many people were talking about this award. It was a little bit hard to handle. But now – he said – I am happy. I am very happy.”