InContention’s Guy Lodge just posted the news that:
Sealing its status as the de facto critics’ darling of 2012 so far, it was also just emerged as the winner of the FIPRESCI Grand Prix — an annual award voted on by the 200-plus members of the international critics’ federation, given to the best film premiered in the last 12 months. Haneke now joins Pedro Almodovar and Paul Thomas Anderson as the only two-time winners of the Grand Prix, which has been awarded since 1999.
They’ve put Amour in their sidebar over at In Contention but Oscar, you know, has a foreign language category and it’s not often a film makes the leap out of a category its assumed to win in – it happens sometimes, of course, just not very often. Usually enthusiasm, and out and out LOVE will do this. Amour is certainly a contender for Best Picture (why wouldn’t it be) it’s just that In Contention does it differently than we do. We try to track them as they go, where In Contention makes predictions. So I’m not really sure if it will stay there but, worth noting. We’ve had Haneke in for writing and possibly directing but its winning the Fipresci seems somewhat significant.
Lodge says that Amour was heavily buzzed in Telluride but I have to say that the other Sony Pics Classics movie did better there — Rust & Bone, perhaps because Marion Cotillard was there, made a bigger splash, I think. Cotillard is headed for a Best Actress nomination but Best Picture is generally driven by the director and Haneke’s Amour is absolutely a director’s picture. Both films are great. Amour is perfect. There is no question that it’s a deserving Best Picture nominee. Whether it will get there or not is a different story. It’s definitely going to be one of the strongest in the foreign film category.