Oscar hat-trick good news for disgruntled French film
Claire Rosemberg

PARIS—France’s triple Oscar win, including a Hollywood top nod for Best Actress, comes as a blessing for a film industry increasingly in fear of losing life-saving state support. President Nicolas Sarkozy, whose fledgling government’s alleged cost-cutting is at the root of industry anxiety, himself said in a message that France’s three Oscars “illustrate the excellence of French cinema, which has been unfailing over time.”
But barely 48 hours before the Hollywood awards took place, France’s own yearly prize-giving film ceremony, the Cesars, showcased a spot of cinematic drama played out in French movie-houses, and live on French television. As the curtains went up on the Cesars — where in a prequel to the Oscars Marion Cotillard took home a Cesar Best Actress for her role as legendary singer Edith Piaf — around 200 of France’s 1,000-odd independent art house movie theatres closed their doors in protest against feared cuts in cultural subsidies to local theatres and festivals.
Simultaneously, the country’s SRF film-makers association released a statement denouncing a cut in subsidies to art house theatres and calling for more government backing. “These are bad times for French film,” said the SFR, “three-quarters of ticket sales come from 17 percent of films made.”
“We want to build a sustainable environment for small fragile films and find a way of improving the system,” said one of the SFR’s co-presidents, Pierre Salvadori. France for years has argued that cultural products are different from others and must be protected — a policy known as cultural exception.
Under this system, the state advances funding for films and sets quotas on non-French footage broadcast on national TV. A percentage of all tickets sold at the box office is recycled to fund new movies. The outcome has been a healthy film industry, the third biggest after the United States and India. And France is the only European country where foreign films represent less than half the market.