I went to an awards ceremony tonight courtesy of an invite from a director I met recently; the 5th Annual FIESP Awards, an award dedicated specifically to films from the state of São Paulo. His intention was that I go there to meet people from the industry that he would introduce to me to, thereby increasing my potential contacts here in São Paulo. He never showed up. But it didn't matter, I got to watch people receive some awards and thank their teams and their family and their dogs, and I also learnt a little about Brazilian films from last year (which I intend to now seek out and watch) plus learn some names and faces in the industry.

There was no Billy Crystal hosting the ceremony, but there was a troupe of clowns, so it was pretty much the same. The clowns were actually pretty funny and despite having to read out the cheesy jokes that had been written for them, they actually made fun of the jokes themselves (meta-comic clowns, evidently) which made it genuinely funny. There was also a set piece involving a penalty kick situation in which all the clowns only spoke through whistles. I never knew a whistle had a such a range of sounds. They made the point that the circus and cinema aren't that far apart from each other, both of them looking to entertaining audiences and both involving large numbers of people orchestrating everything, which is partly true. On a side note, the circus is actually quite an important tradition here in Brazil and there's a New Circus movement that's been around some time, reintrepreting those circus traditions to bring them to a modern audience. There's even a clown college in my neighbourhood. But I digress.

There were all the usual awards you'd expect, bar make-up oddly enough. I guess that came under art direction. Each award had only three nominees; the 2 main contenders in nearly all the categories were Fernando Meirelles' 'Blindness' and Laís Bodanzky's 'Chega de Saudade' (The Ballroom), with a number of films sharing the third nomination. Evidently, it was a testament to the quality of both productions to the popularity of the 2 films but it seemed a shame that only 2 films could monopolise practically the whole ceremony. Of course this happens elsewhere but at least at other festivals there are normally 5 nominations, meaning there's a little more scope in the potential winners. Still, what can you do?

I saw Meirelles walking around before the ceremony itself, swarmed by photographers, camera crews, friends and admirers. Even a "I like your films" from me was out of the question. In fact I would've asked him about a story that I heard involving him and Steven Spielberg, but I'll come to that later. Surprisingly, Meirelles was 1 of 3 faces that I recognised tonight, and that's 5 more than I expected to; there was also Leonardo Medeiros, a Brazilian actor who was in 'Birdwatchers' (which I wrote about some time ago) and a cult horror B-movie director called José Mojica Marins AKA Zé do Caixão, or Coffin Joe in English. He's a living legend here, and he's somewhat of a character as you can see him in his usual attire.

Those fingernails aren't fake either. His film 'Encarnação do Demônio' (Embodiment of Evil) was nominated for quite a few awards and he ended up winning best actor. They showed some clips and it really was 80s B-movie stuff, despite being made last year. Most of the audience were laughing throughout the clips and I'm sure that was the intention since the acting was atrocious. But if an actor acts badly and that fits the mood of the film, does that merit a best actor award? In any case, the film looks pretty entertaining for what it is, and maybe it was just a conciliatory prize or something.

Someone else I thought I recognised was Steven Spielberg, or rather his South American counterpart. He looked somewhat like this:

That was in fact Cássio Amarante, the art director of 'Encarnação do Demônio' who also won an award. That was probably better deserved since the art direction did look pretty good. But then the other nominee was 'Blindness', in which they had painstakingly applied the '28 Days Later' disaster aftermath look of London to São Paulo. Having lived in the city for 6 months now, it was surprising to show how much I could recognise in even so short a clip, despite all the efforts to make the city unspecific. So another conciliatory award for Coffin Joe? Hmmm...

This brings me nicely to the Spielberg/Meirelles story. I heard that at some awards ceremony, Spielberg asked Meirelles how he had managed to film the chicken scene in 'City of God', specifically when the camera is behind the chicken following it along. In all his time he'd never managed to do something like that because the chicken just went in another direction. Meirelles: "Easy, we just tied a camera to a broom and shooed it along." That's probably one of the best examples of Brazilian ingenuity I've ever heard. To hell with a professional animal trainer, someone get a broomstick and some ducktape. That'll do the trick!