Initially a television award, the German weekly Hörzu's Golden Camera Award now covers a variety of categories, including movies, music, sports, pop culture, and even activism. Unlike the German Film Academy's prestigious Lola Awards — Germany's equivalent of the Oscars — the Golden Camera is basically a pop award.
At a ceremony held Saturday, Feb. 4, at the Berlin headquarters of Hörzu's publishing house Axel Springer, this year's winners in the international movie categories were Scarlett Johansson and Denzel Washington, while Morgan Freeman received a Lifetime Achievement trophy. A couple of weeks ago, Freeman received a similar honor — the Cecil B. DeMille Award — from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. Additionally, Dionne Warwick received her own Lifetime Achievement Golden Camera in the music category.
Now, not that the U.S. media would know or care about this little detail, but, gasp, there were non-American Golden Camera winners as well. One of those, another Lifetime Achievement Award recipient, was the Swiss-born veteran Mario Adorf, 81, whose film career spans more than five decades. Actress Hannelore Elsner introduced Adorf, her co-star in several motion pictures and in the recent TV movie The Last Patriarch (2010), as "a dear friend for many years," calling him "the grandmaster of German actors."
Among Adorf's more than 130 film credits are Robert Siodmak's Oscar nominated The Devil Strikes at Night (1957), Rainer Werner Fassbinder's The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1975), Billy Wilder's Fedora (1978), Volker Schlöndorff's Oscar winner and Cannes co-winner The Tin Drum (1979), and Bille August's Smilla's Sense of Snow (1987).
Liv Lisa Fries, 21, was the recipient of the Lilli Palmer and Curd Jürgens Award — which comes with 20,000 euros — given to newcomers. Among Fries' credits are the television movie Father Mother Murder, and the big-screen features Closer Than Blood and Romeos.
An estimated 5.23 million people watched this year's Golden Camera Awards ceremony, which also featured Til Schweiger, Armin Mueller-Stahl, and Miss Piggy. That represented about 800,000 more viewers than last year, but 400,000 less than the audience for the competition show "Germany Looks for a Superstar."
Scarlett Johansson, Denzel Washington, Dionne Warwick, Morgan Freeman Golden Camera Award photo via Lausitzer Rundschau (Maurizio Gambarini). Check out the site, which offers about a dozen images from the ceremony.