Unofficial Academy Awards Discussion Board

"The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2014 was awarded to Jean Tirole 'for his analysis of market power and regulation'."

Well, I was finally inspired to watch Lacombe Lucien. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s a masterpiece, but it is an excellent film. Deceptively simple and very effective, it’s a reminder of what an original director Louis Malle was. It would be interesting to know what role Modiano had in the writing process. Presumably Malle brought him in because he had written a lot about the time period.

HarryGoldfarb wrote:

Big Magilla wrote:Pierre Blaise, the film's protagonist, was a non-actor chosen by Malle over 1,000 other contenders. He was an overnight sensation cast in three other films but still living on the family farm when he and two friends were killed in an accident returning from a party in a rainstorm when he lost control of the car he had bought with his film earnings. He was only 23.

Acordono to Wikipedia, he was only 20 by the time of his death.

That would be even more tragic if true, but I think the February, 1952 birthdate seems more accurate. I think he was a couple years older than the character he played in the film as an 18 year-old.

Big Magilla wrote:Pierre Blaise, the film's protagonist, was a non-actor chosen by Malle over 1,000 other contenders. He was an overnight sensation cast in three other films but still living on the family farm when he and two friends were killed in an accident returning from a party in a rainstorm when he lost control of the car he had bought with his film earnings. He was only 23.

Acordono to Wikipedia, he was only 20 by the time of his death.

"The Nobel Peace Prize 2014 was awarded jointly to Kailash Satyarthi and Malala Yousafzai 'for their struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education'."

Lacombe, Lucien is Louis Malle's masterpiece, a great film about the banality of evil. How much of the writing was Modiano's as opposed to Malle's I have no idea, but it's a tough story about a naïve farm boy who, rejected by the Resistance in 1944, who goes to work as an enforcer for the Gestapo in the last days of the war. Holger Lowenadler won numerous awards as the old man who befriends and is betrayed by him. Pierre Blaise, the film's protagonist, was a non-actor chosen by Malle over 1,000 other contenders. He was an overnight sensation cast in three other films but still living on the family farm when he and two friends were killed in an accident returning from a party in a rainstorm when he lost control of the car he had bought with his film earnings. He was only 23.

I’m guessing that a lot of people here have seen Lacombe Lucien. Embarrassingly, I haven’t - even though I do have the DVD sitting on my shelf with a bunch of other films I should see. Hopefully now I will get the inspiration to finally watch it.

I have seen another film which Modiano has co-written, Bon voyage, and I was really unimpressed by it, even though it somehow managed to win a César Award for Best Picture.

Modiano joins several other Nobel laureates who have writted screenplays. John Steinbeck, Jean-Paul Sartre and Harold Pinter even received Oscar nominations, while G.B.Shaw is the only person to have won both an Academy Award and a Nobel Prize in Literature, the two most prestigious cultural awards on the planet. The Nobel laureate with the most impressive film credentials, however, is William Faulkner, who never received an Oscar nomination.

For sure, others have dabbled in screenwriting as well. Gabriel García Márquez wrote several screenplays, but I have never seen any of the films he wrote.

I read that Patrick Modiano cowrote the screenplay for Lacombe, Lucien. Has anyone seen it, and, if so, what did you think of it?

"The Nobel Prize in Literature 2014 was awarded to Patrick Modiano 'for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation'."

Sounds a bit cartoony, but nevermind: Nobel Prize winning chemist, Professor Hell. Unless he likes to be known as Dr. Hell. And he's born in Transylvania. I hope he's got his name trademarked.

"The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2014 was awarded jointly to Eric Betzig, Stefan W. Hell and William E. Moerner 'for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy'."

"The Nobel Prize in Physics 2014 was awarded jointly to Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura 'for the invention of efficient blue light-emitting diodes which has enabled bright and energy-saving white light sources."

Today starts the awarding of the 2014 Nobel Prizes. First up is the Physiology Or Medicine Prize "awarded with one half to John O'Keefe and the other half jointly to May-Britt Moser and Edvard I. Moser 'for their discoveries of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain'."

To read more: http://www.nobelprize.org/