Polanski as winner of the hearts
We would all like to forget #metoo, but what can you do when the women who started the discussion just won't give it a rest? The filmmakers can't manage to keep up with the invitations from all the film academies to their splendid and ostentatious award ceremonies anyway, athletes have it easier because the sports associations plan their competitions among themselves. After the US Film Academy Awards, the Berlinale in Berlin, which funnily enough awards an animal figure instead of a jumping jack, and the magnificent fortune cookie awards in Saarland, the ladies didn't even have to take off their gowns and the gentlemen their dinner jacket jackets before heading to Paris, to the film festival at the Salle Pleyel, where 22 nominations and 3 special awards were waiting to receive the third most valuable prize in the film industry, just in time before all events involving more than five people were cancelled due to risk of infection.
The staging of the awards
The favourite in the exciting battle for the blockbuster named like a pet food with embellishments is the work "Intrigue" by the almost French director Roman Polanski, who was not invited, but his actors, the sets and his second cameraman were. It would have been difficult anyway to smuggle the half-Pole, who has been in hiding for 84 years, into the French capital without him being arrested on the way.
To exude the glamour of days gone by at the event, old footage from the red carpet was shown on the screen at the closing ceremony, when no demonstrators disturbed the flurry of flashbulbs, but the still youthfully fresh Polanski climbed the steps to the cinema alongside his female companions who towered over him by three heads.
In the run-up, the entire committee and presidium had resigned to give the award ceremony the drama it deserved. Ostensibly, it was not about the protests against the nominated director accused of rape in 395 cases, with which he has only 922 fewer accusations than Harvey Weinsteen, who is 30 years younger, but about transparency of management in the Académie des Arts de la Dramatique et Techniques du Cinéma.
Of course, it was pointed out that it was by no means a contest of misconduct, because after all, Weinsteen was a producer with his own couch in the office, while Polanski was only a director without his own chair next to the camera. And all this was then, in a faraway land, no one saw it. Inconceivably, the street in front of the famous Théâtre impérial du Châtelet was besieged by women with placards and banners to make it difficult for the poor diamond necklace wearers to enter. As if protesting against a rigged game had ever changed anything.
The jury has decided
The reason given by the laudator, who was appointed at short notice, for the decision on which film would receive the César for Best Director, which had been kept secret for a long time, was that the gender of the person directing the film had not played a role (in French, gender-neutral sounds much more resonant than it does in German, of course). Rather, it was the life's work and not the sperm production that had been taken into account in the judgement. The laudator, who spoke without an accent, took the liberty of making a joke with the term "Einfließen" (flowing in) and "Urteilsfindung" (reaching a verdict), alluding to the rape trial, which, on the other hand, cannot be translated at all.
At the after-show party, finally, all camps came together, except of course men, who had to stay outside because of their aggressively outward-facing extra organ between their legs, and wheelchair-bound women who could not climb the stairs to the cinema hall built in 1862. In the end, lesbians and feminists alike were in each other's arms, singing songs to the little novel that ultimately does occupy a very special spot in their hearts, because the dried-up evidence of the ejaculate stains will be needed in the USA if he ever returns there.