PARIS— Roman Polanski, the 77-year-old director whose film “The Ghost Writer” was snubbed by the Oscars, won a measure of solace on Friday when the French cultural elite showered the thriller with four Césars. The honors (France’s version of the Academy Awards) included a best directing nod for Mr. Polanski, who was vigorously supported by French film and political celebrities when he was arrested in September 2009 on a more than 30-year-old sex crime warrant from the United States and jailed and detained in Switzerland until he successfully fended off extradition last July.
Mr. Polanski wended his way among applauding supporters and admirers through the opulent 19th century opera house of the Théâtre du Châtelet to collect his award for “The Ghost Writer,”
which starred Pierce Brosnan and Ewan McGregor. (He also shared the César for best adapted screenplay with Robert Harris, and the film captured awards for best editing and best score for Alexandre Desplat,
who is in Oscar contention for his music for “The King’s Speech.”) But its play for a best picture award – despite being in English, the movie was eligible because of local French financing
and staff – fell short. Instead the top prize went to “Of Gods and Men” – a story about French Cistercian
Trappist monks slain by Algerian fundamentalists, which was spurned by the Oscars in its foreign-language
category.
The 36th annual Césars awards ceremony offered Mr. Polanski an opportunity to bask in his stolid support from Paris, where he lives and is now working on a new film, an adaption
of Yasmina Reza‘s Tony Award-winning comedy “The God of Carnage.”
“The Ghost Writer” was finished while Mr. Polanski was still under house arrest in his chalet in Gstaad, Switzerland, travails that the director made a passing reference to when he made a brief speech in French.
“I finished this film while in jail so I would like to thank all the people who helped me and supported me until the very end,” said Mr. Polanski, who has been honored before with Césars in 1980 for “Tess” and in 2002 for “The Pianist.”
The doling out of the top awards to “Of Gods and Men” and to Mr. Polanski was viewed as something of a compromise and a show of support for the director, according to Georges Goldenstern, who has been attending the awards ceremony for years and is the executive director for the Cinefondation for the Cannes film festival.
Jodie Foster, who is starring with Kate Winslet in Mr Polanski’s new film, also played a visible role at the Césars as honorary president and the presenter of the best film picture award, reading her lines from a teleprompter in polished lycee French.
In front row seats, she joined the film director Quentin Tarantino, who was also presented with an honorary career award and treated to heavy-handed humor and word play about his penchant for using a certain swear word.
Mr. Tarantino, who accepted his hefty golden César award by speaking in English, offered his final thank you with an exuberant cheer of “Vive le cinéma !” The audience, numbering close to 3,000, gave the director a standing ovation at all levels of the theater.
The reaction for Mr. Polanski’s triumph was a bit more measured: he received a standing ovation concentrated in the first level where most of France’s marque stars were sitting in crimson chairs.