MUMBAI: After chasing it for 11 years, Ethan Coen and Joel Coen have finally won the coveted Best Director Oscar for No Country for Old Men. The Coen Brothers had earned the Best Screenplay award for Fargo in 1997.
“Joel and I have been making stories with a movie camera since we were kids. What we do now doesn‘t feel that much different from what we did then,” said Ethan Coen while recieving the award for best direction along with his brother, making them the first siblings to win the award.
The violent thriller has emerged as the biggest winner at the 80th Oscar function, taking home awards for the best picture, best adapted screenplay and best supporting actor for Javier Bardem.
The film, which has earned over $64 million at the domestic box office and $30 million overseas, is the 12th movie co-written and directed by the Coen brothers.
A bleak and gory drama, No Country For Old Men has beat out its arch rivals Juno, Michael Clayton, There Will Be Blood and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly for the win.
While French Lady Marion Cotillard sweeped the best actress‘ award for La Vie En Rose, British actor Daniel Day-Lewis won the best actor‘s award for There Will be Blood.
“Thank you life. Thank you love. It is true, there are some angels in this city; thank you so much,” said an ecstatic Cotillard looking at the prized possession in her hand.
While the award for best supporting actor went to Spain‘s Javier Bardem for his performance as a psychopathic hitman in No Country for Old Men, Britain‘s Tilda Swinton, who played a calculating corporate legal chief in Michael Clayton, bagged a best supporting actress Oscar.
“Thank you to the Coens for being crazy enough to think that I could do that and put one of the most horrible haircuts in history on my head,” said Bardem.
Austria‘s The Counterfeiters won the best foreign film award which is based on a true story of a group of Jewish prisoners recruited by the Nazis to mount one of the largest counterfeiting operations in history.
Though Paul Thomas Anderson‘s There Will Be Blood got nominated in eight categories, it could take home only two awards – for cinematography and best actor.
The Bourne Ultimatum, which was not nominated for a single major award, walked out with three Oscars in the technical categories.
To remind the world of all its bleak realities, the jury gave away the Oscar to Alex Gibney‘s Taxi to the Dark Side, for the best documentary.
The film revolves around the interrogation and grilling techniques at US military facilities, investigating the death of Dilawar, a young Afghan taxi driver in custody, at a prison in Afghanistan in 2002.
While collecting his Oscar, Gibney said, “This is dedicated to two people who are no longer with us, Dilawar, the young Afghan taxi driver, and my father, a navy interrogator who urged me to make this film because of his fury at what was being done to the rule of law.”
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