Todd Phillips' 'Joker' Wins Golden Lion at the 2019 Venice Film Festival
by Alex Billington
September 7, 2019
Send in the clowns. The 76th Venice Film Festival wrapped up this weekend on the Lido, and the awards were handed out. The top prize at Venice is a Golden Lion (in honor of the iconic lion that is the symbol of the city) and it's one of the greatest achievements in cinema, along with the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. This year's big winner is Joker, the dark, gnarly, unlike-anything-before-it audacious comic book movie starring Joaquin Phoenix as the green-haired Gotham City villain. Other winners include an Italian actor named Luca Marinelli, who stars in the title role of Martin Eden, a major film which many critics loved here. And the young actor from the Australian film Babyteeth, named Toby Wallace, even though his co-star Eliza Scanlen didn't win (though she deserved to share this with him). All the winners are amusing and it makes me laugh because they're bold choices. The full list of Venezia 76 winners can be found below.
Main Venice Awards
The Venezia Jury, chaired by Lucrecia Martel, and comprised of Stacy Martin, Mary Harron, Piers Handling, Rodrigo Prieto, Shinya Tsukamoto, and Paolo Virzì, having viewed all 21 films in competition, has decided:
Golden Lion for Best Film:
Joker by Todd Phillips (USA)
Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize:
J'Accuse (An Officer and a Spy) by Roman Polanski (France, Italy)
Silver Lion Award for Best Director:
Roy Andersson for the film About Endlessness
Coppa Volpi for Best Actress:
Ariane Ascaride in the film Gloria Mundi by Robert Guédiguian
Coppa Volpi for Best Actor:
Luca Marinelli in the film Martin Eden by Pietro Marcello
Award for Best Screenplay:
Yonfan for No. 7 Cherry Lane
Special Jury Prize:
The Mafia Is No Longer What It Used to Be by Franco Maresco
Marcello Mastroianni Award for Best Young Actor or Actress:
Toby Wallace in the film Babyteeth by Shannon Murphy
"Luigi De Laurentiis" Venice Award for a Debut Film:
You Will Die at 20 by Amjad Abu Alala
Venice Classics Awards
The Venice Classics Jury, chaired by Costanza Quatriglio, with 22 cinema history students – nominated by their professors – from Italian universities, DAMS performing arts courses, and Ca' Foscari University of Venice, has decided to award:
Venice Classics Award for Best Documentary on Cinema:
Babenco: Tell Me When I Die by Bárbara Paz
Venice Classics Award for Best Restored Film:
Ecstasy (Ekstase) by Gustav Machatý (Czechoslovakia, 1932)
That's all for now. For the full list of awards (including VR), head to labiennale.org. Congratulations to all of the winners this year. As for my thoughts on these winners: ahahahahahahahaha, oh it's hilarious!! Is Joker the BEST film of the festival? Nope. (I would say the best films are Marriage Story and Babyteeth, though everyone has their own favorites). But is Joker still good enough to win? Yes! Definitely. It's a completely unexpected, incredibly dark, audacious film that has Joaquin Phoenix giving a phenomenal performance (here's my full review). As for the rest of the winners, they should've given the Young Actor Award to lead actress Eliza Scanlen in Babyteeth instead. And the other awards are all surprisingly odd but not terrible choices. If anything, these winners will seriously stir things up and fuel conversation. Which is a good thing, right? This concludes our coverage of the 2019 Venice Film Festival, but we should be back again next year.
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