02/26/2007

Oscar Awards

Germany's "The Lives of Others" Wins Oscar

"The Lives of Others" has won an Oscar for best foreign language film, only the third German film ever to win the award. Martin Scorsese's "The Departed" was the big winner of the evening, clinching four Oscars.

And the Oscar goes to ... Germany, for a change.

The German film "The Lives of Others" about how the East German secret police invaded people's lives has won an Oscar for best foreign language film.

First-time director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck said at the ceremony in Los Angeles Sunday evening that he hopes the success will counteract a trend in Germany towards feeling nostalgic about the communist era.

"I was happy it worked against this whole new phenomenon in Germany that people feel nostalgic for the East and start glorifying the Communist past," Donnersmarck said.

Recent films such as "Good Bye Lenin!", "Sonnenallee" and "NVA" have taken a light-hearted look back at the communist regime and avoided dealing with state persecution in the German Democratic Republic. In contrast, "The Lives of Others," set in the early 1980s, features a Stasi secret police officer assigned to spy on a playwright and his actress girlfriend. The movie, which was a hit in Germany, successfully evokes the climate of fear in the GDR and the corruption that pervaded the system.

The film swept last year's Lola film awards in Germany as well as the European Film Awards, and Donnersmarck told Reuters in a recent interview that he hoped an Oscar would give the film more exposure and "signal power."

"An Oscar is the ultimate symbol of recognition so it means everything," he said. "Everybody in the world dreams of winning an Oscar, even people who don't work in films."

The film has had the most successful launch in the United States of any German film, playing to packed theatres and earning almost $750,000 in the first two weeks since its launch. It is only the third German film to win an Oscar, after "Nowhere in Africa" in 2002 and "The Tin Drum," an adaptation of the Günter Grass novel of the same name, in 1980.

After winning the award, Donnersmarck thanked California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger "for teaching me that the words 'I can't' should be stricken from my vocabulary."

The biggest winner of the evening was Martin Scorsese who picked up four Oscars for his crime thriller "The Departed," including Best Picture and Best Director. British actress Helen Mirren won Best Actress for "The Queen" about the tense days following the death of Princess Diana in 1997, and Forest Whitaker won Best Actor for his portrayal of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in "The Last King of Scotland."

cro/dpa/Reuters

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