"Golden Horse" Nominees Include Two Oscar Hopefuls
Tuesday, October 4, 2011 at 9:30AM
NATHANIEL R in A Simple Life, Andy Lau, Asian cinema, Oscars (11), Seediq Bale, Shu Qi, foreign films

China's Oscar submission this year, Zhang Yimou's The Flowers of War (previously discussed) was not released in time to show up in the nominations for its own country's Oscar equivalent. Nevertheless two Asian submissions for this year's Best Foreign Film Oscar race are competing for the "Golden Horse". While there are multiple film awards which hail from Asia (it can be horribly confusing to follow) The Golden Horse is the oldest and most inclusive of the awards institutions as there are no nationality requirements, only that the film be predominantly in a Chinese language. As is our habit and general proclivity let's start with Best Picture and Best Actress, the two most important categories in any awards show.

Let the Bullets Fly, Piano in a Factory and A Simple Life (pictured) compete for "Best Feature Film" alongside "Return Ticket" and "Seediq Bale"

Best Picture

Let the Bullets Fly, set in the 20s, pits Chow Yun Fat (playing a local tyrant) against an intruding bandit chief for control of a provincial town. The Piano in a Factory is a dramedy about a child of divorce who lets it be known that she will live with whichever parent can provide her with a piano. Her money-strapped musician father concocts a plan to raise the money. I couldn't find much info on Return Ticket (damn those movie titles with utterly generic titles that lead you all the wrong places in google searches) The Oscar submissions are discussed on the Foreign Film Charts so chase those links above.

Best Actress 

Chen, Ip, Hailu and Shu Qi compete for Best Actress

The Best Actress shortlist has a huge age range from 28 year old Chen (who looks even younger) to 63 year old frontrunner Deanie Ip who recently won Best Actress at the Venice Film Festival for her role as an aging nanny who needs the man she raised (Andy Lau) to care for her. The category is rounded out by superstar Shu Qi (sometimes credited as Qi Shu) who is familiar to international audiences from several films that have travelled the world (Millenium Mambo, Three Times, So Close, Transporter, etcetera). A Beautiful Life is described as a romantic tragicomedy in that it begins as a romcom only to veer towards disability drama as the beautiful gold-digging Shu Qi meets and mistreats a man who really loves her before he receives a terrible diagnosis.

Complete nominee list and controversial Oscar submission after the jump...

Best Director

 Best New Director

Best Actor

Jump Ashin!'s marketing was largely built around the physique that its star Eddie Peng built for his title role as the gymnast "Ashin". The 29 year old Taiwanese actor actually grew up in Canada. He may have tough competition here though, particularly from Andy Lau's starpower in a film that is definitely in the Best Picture running. Update: a Taiwanese reader, who helped with this post -thanks! - thinks it's You Ge's to lose. Some of you may remember him from those Gong Li pictures Farewell My Concubine or To Live in the '90s.

 Best Supporting Actor

 Best New Performer

Unlike the Oscars, the Golden Horse allow double dipping for the same role since Bokeh Kosang (sometimes spelled Bowkeh Kowsang... and many other spellings pop up, too) is nominated for Supporting Actor and "New Performer". I believe that Seediq Bale is his first film but I could be wrong. IMDb can't always be trusted on foreign performers since they're not always completist with world cinema.

Best Supporting Actress

Kara Hui and Liu Yifei in Chinese Ghost Story (2011) which is also up for best visual effects

Best Original Screenplay

 Best Adapted Screenplay

Best Cinematography

 Zhao Fei's work is familiar to us here in the west, too. He lensed the international arthouse hit Raise the Red Lantern and served a three year stint as Woody Allen's DP (Sweet and Lowdown, Small Time Crooks and The Curse of the Jade Scorpion) 

Best Visual Effects

Best Art Direction

Best Makeup & Costume Design

Best Action Choreography 

Best Original Score

Best Original Film Song 

OSCAR-CENTRIC ASIDE: Warriors the Rainbow: Seediq Bale is doing huge box office in Taiwan and won the most nominations at the Golden Horse Awards. It has sold distribution rights in multiple other countries (US still under negotiation apparently). Here's an interesting report (subtitled) on various controversies surrounding it.

 

Best Film Editing

Best Sound Effects

Best Documentary 

Best Short Film

Animated Feature

Lifetime Achievement Award

Shan-hsi Ting was a Taiwanese writer director of more than 50 films who died in 2009.

Finally... Here's the poster for the Golden Horse Film Festival (next month) starring last year's Best Actor winner Ethan Ruan (Monga)

 

The official explanation of this poster goes like so.

The official poster for 2011 Golden Horse Film Festival was masterminded by famed designer Lin Xiao-Yi. Building on the advertisement directed by Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Lin developed a three-dimensional space constructed with night, dream, and light. "Night" stands for the darkness enveloping the audience inside the movie theater. "Dream" signifies the process of dreammaking in each filmmaking experience. As for "light," it is the ray of light that breaks through the darkness and the particles of light that linger in the air as the movie projector starts rolling, which constitutes our first and foremost visual memory of movies. Through these interlinked connections is brought out the image of the glance that compresses the history of one hundred years.

Night, Dream and Light... to describe the beauty of moviegoing?
 I love it, don't you?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Article originally appeared on The Film Experience (http://thefilmexperience.net/).
See website for complete article licensing information.