The World Cup, in Cinema, isn't ours

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The impressive take in the Globo's stadium: revisited platinism

The Muylaert and Geneton's lecture, still, last saturday.

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The theme, as said, was the painful "stray complex". Yes, it is - in a very smaller scale, something similar is ocurring in... cinema. If until the end of the Fifties the Brazilian Team, almost always, trembled before Uruguayans and Argentinians (paúra also known as "platinism"), on cinema screens, from time to time, the Brazilian cinema reaches the Oscar cerimony always almost and... loses it. So it was with O Quatrilho, Central do Brasil (Central Station - with the nomination of Fernanda Torres for best actress) and Cidade de Deus (City of God - with four nominations). None came.

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The validity of Oscar as a reference to mesure which are the good films is relative. It's possible to refuse it, as did Marlon Brando in 1973, when he was chosen the best actor. In the Brazilian case, otherwise, there's an intense lobby to won it, always unsucessfully. There's a big desire for this trophy, almost an obsession.

In 2005, the Uruguayan Jorge Drexler won the best soundtrack prize for Al Otro Lado Del Río, in Los Diarios de Motocicleta (The Motorcycle Diaries), a multinational production, directed by Walter Salles. And today the Argentinian film El Secreto de Sus Ojos (The Secret in Their Eyes), by Juan José Campanella, won the statue for best foreign film (many times almost won by Brazilian films). And it's not the first time this occours: in 1986, La Historia Oficial (The Official Story), by the also Argentinian director Luiz Puenzo, won the same prize.

One of the film scenes (a drama about the investigation of a homicide, 30 years ago) is entitled to the prize: one persecution in the Huracán Stadium, called Tomás Adolfo Ducó, in Buenos Aires, a story that ends, literally, in a penalty. The initial sequence in the Globo's stadium, aerial, is impressive.

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Not to say that no Brazilian film never won an Oscar, in 1986 O Beijo da Mulher Aranha (The Kiss of the Spider Woman), directed by Héctor Babenco, won the best actor's prize, with William Hurt. A small-huge detail: Babenco was born in Mar del Plata.

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