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Austria shining
Austria, known more for Mozart than movies, is hoping to make it big at the Oscars next month. The birthplace of action megastar Arnold Schwarzenegger is also increasingly a film awards juggernaut.
Austria, known more for
Mozart
than movies, is hoping to make it big at the Oscars next month. The birthplace of action megastar Arnold Schwarzenegger is also increasingly a film awards juggernaut.
Christoph Waltz, the front-runner for best supporting actor for
Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds
, is perhaps the most high-profile of the Austrians in contention at the March 7 ceremony.
Director Michael Haneke and cinematographer Christian Berger, meanwhile, are in the running for best foreign language film and best cinematography for their work on
The White Ribbon
, a disturbing black-and-white drama submitted by neighbouring Germany, presenting a sombre study of a troubled village during World War I.
Austrians — or those with links to the country — were generally irrelevant at the Oscars for decades. Haneke and Waltz are the biggest names, but in the last several years the Alpine nation of roughly 8.3 million has had a regular seat at the ceremony. In 2008, Stefan Ruzowitzky took home the foreign-language Oscar for The Counterfeiters, the tale of a master forger forced to work for Nazis in a concentration camp. Last year, Goetz Spielmann’s Revanche earned a nomination in the same category, although the movie went home empty-handed.
Martin Schweighofer, managing director of the Austrian Film Commission, sees the recent Oscar win and nominations as just several of a slew of confirmations that the country’s small film industry is becoming increasingly respected abroad. “In 2009, Austria got roughly 100 prizes — that’s an incredible number,” he said.
