More Chinese movie awards

Shanghaiist has a retraction to make -- what we previously dubbed the "Chinese Oscars" in this post was absolutely wrong, because, naturally, the 6th Chinese Language Movie Awards (第6届华语电影传媒大奖）deserve this title. This awards ceremony had previously been held in the mainland, but this time (April 17), they moved it to Hong Kong. And guess who won? Tony Leung Ka-fei (Liang Jiahui) won best actor for the 80th eighth time for his role in Election (Hei Shehui). The only "surprise" came in the success of Peacock (孔雀), the debut film from cinematographer turned director Gu Changwei, which took home awards for best director, best original screenplay, and best actress for Zhang Jingchu. Election won best film awards, again. We don't get it -- if all these film awards are pretty much the same, and there are so many of them, then isn't each one worth correspondingly less? Does this really award good cinema, or is it just a kind of collective Chinese movie industry circle-jerk in installments? You be the judge.

In other movie related news: By now you know that Steven Spielberg is set to help out Zhang Yimou with the Beijing Olympic ceremonies, and both were supposedly on CCTV 6 together on April 17. We didn't hear about it until we saw this article (in Chinese), which has some excerpts of what they had to say, though by putting Zhang's stuff first followed by Spielberg's, it doesn't make it sound like the "dialogue" the article said it was. Did anyone catch this one?

Last but definitely not least, Zhang Ziyi is the new face of US-China relations. The actress is supposed to show up at a White House ceremony. The Chinese-language media in the US has been featuring some of her recent activities, asking her daring questions such as "Are you nervous?" about all the political personages she would have to meet in the coming days, and she said "No," replying that there were so many Chinese people there anyway that it felt just like a gathering of Chinese people. One American official interviewed said "She's the most beautiful thing that I've ever seen," and was about to leave when he turned back to the camera and added, "except my wife."

Photo from m2m.cn.