Opinion
Academy Awards
Tatort Hollywood: German films don’t need Oscar winners
Director İlker Çatak, leading actress Leonie Benesch and screenwriter Johannes Duncker (from right) received a lot of praise and numerous awards for “The Teacher’s Room”. The film was also nominated for an Oscar.
© R. Heine / Future Image / Imago Images
As deserved as it would be, an award for Sandra Hülser, Wim Wenders or İlker Çatak wouldn’t help German film any further. He’s also on the right track.
But this focus on failure is the dominant German culture. What we should have titled instead: Congratulations!
96th Academy Awards
Not just “Oppenheimer” and “Poor Things”: These are the Oscar winners at a glance
“Made in Germany” – soon a seal of quality in Hollywood?
Sandra Hülser was nominated for best actress – in one French Drama. Wim Wenders could also have won an Oscar with “Perfect Days” – for Japan. In the historical film “Zone of Interest” German actors took on the main roles – in one British-American-Polish co-production. The fact that “The Teacher’s Room” by İlker Çatak, a German film without a hefty PR budget, made it to the Dolby Theater simply because it was good, is the real success story of the evening. And so this Oscar night gives hope. Hope that “Made in Germany” will soon also be considered a seal of quality in Hollywood.
We’re just not there yet. German films are still often almost unbearable. It’s hard to say who is to blame for the maximum mediocrity: the downtrodden mass of television actors for whom overacting is the default setting? The audience that can tolerate a maximum of one twist per feature length film? The screenwriters who write dialogue for chat robots instead of humans? The film funding agencies that rely on the 23rd Schweighöfer comedy out of cultivated fear? Probably a little bit of everything.
But it’s okay! The domestic film industry has made fantastic progress in recent years. Films like “Out of Nothing”, “Sun and Concrete” and “Nothing New from the West” were so impressive that you would deny them being German the first time you watch them. Series like “Vier Blocks”, “Babylon Berlin”, “Dark” and “Bad Banks” have also grabbed the post-crime scene generation, those young viewers who only know linear television as a serving suggestion in grandma’s dusty TV guide. This required an earthquake that only streaming giants can trigger. Netflix, Sky or Disney may be investors rather than philanthropists due to their capitalist nature. But their millions play a large part in the fact that the film industry in this country now pushes far more off the assembly line than the TV murder every Sunday. From Rosamunde Pilcher fast food to Oscar delicacy, that gradually seems possible.
The longing for the “We are Pope” moment at the Oscars
If Sandra Hülser had won the Oscar, it would certainly have been a dream come true for her, but above all it would have been an enormous satisfaction for the German longing for the center stage. Sedated by the easily digestible but tasteless home cooking, the land of poets and lateral thinkers is longing for the representative celebrity that has so far been denied us.
So when a Hollywood star like Leonardo DiCaprio chokes on the pronunciation of the word “Braahtworst” during a press tour at the urging of journalists, it reanimates a feeling of togetherness that we thought was dead. As if it were suddenly entirely possible for DiCaprio to be standing in line at the bakery in Castrop-Rauxel.
Who do we have anyway? We share Daniel Brühl with Spain. Diane Krüger feels more comfortable in Paris than in Peine. Michael Fassbender speaks accent-free German like a barista in Berlin-Mitte. Hans Zimmer? Has been living in self-imposed exile since the silent film era. The German desire for collective recognition goes so far that we are halving the origins of poor Christoph Waltz. The man is (at least) 50 percent Austrian, let’s accept that.
So if Sandra Hülser had triumphed in Los Angeles, we would have greedily seized it – as the “We are Pope” moment in Hollywood. But Germany as a film country doesn’t need a messiah, it needs a revolution. And a steady stream of quality à la “The Teacher’s Room” contributes far more to this than a brief moment in the spotlight.