Israeli films lose again at Oscars
LOS ANGELES (JTA) – Two Israeli documentaries in contention for the Oscar for best documentary lost to the Swedish/British production Searching for Sugar Man, ensuring another year without an Israeli film winning a coveted golden statue.
Among the documentaries that came up short on Sunday night were The Gatekeepers, an Israeli documentary featuring a series of interviews with the six living former leaders of the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency), and 5 Broken Cameras, an IsraeliPalestinian co-production that tells the story of a Palestinian village resisting the encroachment of a nearby Israeli settlement.
Directed by Dror Moreh, The Gatekeepers features the former security chiefs arguing that Israeli policy in the Palestinian territories is ultimately futile and self-defeating. The interviewees say that Israel must try to negotiate with the Palestinians and find a path to a peace settlement – even if it means negotiating with terrorist groups.
5 Broken Cameras was codirected by Palestinian Emad Burnat and Israeli Guy Davidi. A farmer from the village of Bil’in, Burnat began collecting the footage that would become the film in 2005, after the birth of his fourth son, Gibreel. Around that time, the nearby settlement of Modi’in Illit was established, and Burnat found himself chronicling the skirmishes between the villagers protesting the settlement’s blocking of land access and the soldiers brought in to protect it. With financial help from Davidi and the government’s film fund, Burnat turned his raw footage into a documentary.
No Israeli film has ever won an Academy Award, though several films by the American-born director Joseph Cedar have been nominated in the Best Foreign Language Film category. Cedar’s Footnote, nominated last year, lost out to an Iranian film, A Separation. This year, the category was won by the Austrian film Amour, which examines the marriage of an elderly French couple, tested when the wife suffers a stroke. Israel’s nominee, Fill the Void, had been eliminated in the first cut.
Daniel Day-Lewis won his third Oscar for Best Actor, the first actor to do so, for his performance as US President Abraham Lincoln in Lincoln, a film that had been an early frontrunner in the Oscar race. The half-Jewish actor is the son of actress Jill Balcon, whose parents immigrated to Britain from Latvia and Poland.
The film’s other top nominees, director Steven Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner, went home empty handed.
Argo, which chronicles the rescue of six American hostages during the Iranian Revolution, wrapped up the best picture title. Grant Heslov, the picture’s co- producer with George Clooney and star Ben Affleck, accepted the golden statuette and film editor William Goldenberg did likewise in his category.
On Oscar night, in the absence of Billy Crystal and other Jewishly attuned hosts of previous years, first-time master of ceremonies Seth MacFarlane stayed away from the typical Jewish Hollywood jokes during the introductory monologue.
The show made up for this omission in the second part of the evening, when Ted, the X-rated stuffed teddy bear of the same titled movie, made an appearance.
In a skit, Ted “revealed” that his birth name was Theodore Shapiro and he was actually born Jewish, which he figured would assure his acceptance into Hollywood’s ranks.
MacFarlane followed up later with a joke about Hitler, of all people, and a shtick involving the von Trapp family of Sound of Music fame and a blackuniformed SS man.
Meanwhile, Barbra Streisand delivered a soulful rendition of “The Way We Were” in a tribute to the late composer Marvin Hamlisch.