An American Film Critic in Paris Explains the Lumiere Awards

.

VERDICT: Chicagoan Lisa Nesselson has been writing and broadcasting about film, from France, for 40 years

Chicagoan Lisa Nesselson has been writing and broadcasting about film, from France, for 40 years. Seventeen years with Variety caught the tail end of when the English-language trades, pre-internet, wielded genuine power concerning a ‘foreign’ film’s likely trajectory. Nesselson reviewed for SCREEN Int’l for 16 years and was the in-house film critic for French 24-hour news channel France24’s English-language channel for 15 years. She completes her second and final term as president of L’Academie des Lumieres de la Presse Internationale this April. Lisa sat down with The Film Verdict on the eve of the Lumieres.

Q&A: Lisa Nesselson, President

The Film Verdict: What is your best memory of the awards?

Lisa Nesselson: It would be hard to top the 2020 ceremony when I got to stand on the stage of the Olympia Music Hall, where Edith Piaf and The Beatles once performed, to give the Best Director trophy to Roman Polanski for his stupendous ‘An Officer and a Spy’. His first assistant accepted it. One of the most influential agents in France came up to me on the way out of the auditorium to say, ´Thank you to the Academy for your intelligence. I hope the Cesars will show the same intelligence.´. But, alas, all hell broke loose after the Cesar nominations and the narrative took hold that the greatest living French director should be shunned. Another terrific memory was when we gave a special award to Claude Lelouch, Anouk Aimee and Jean-Louis Trintignant for the anniversary of ‘A Man and a Woman’. I sang part of my tribute to the famous theme from the film. We also gave an honorary Lumiere to Jane Birkin that year and Jane complimented me on my voice!

TFV: How long have you been involved?

Nesselson: I’ll be stepping down as President in April, after 8 years. Before that I was conscientious about voting. We’re a relatively small non-profit so every vote counts.

TFV: Is it still televised?

Nesselson: We had a 3-year partnership with Canal Plus, which carried the show. It was their goal to telecast all the awards shows they could, starting with the Cesars of course and the Oscars. They telecast the Opening and Closing ceremonies in Cannes for many, many years but French public television now does the honors. And this year Disney + will carry the Oscars in France. We live stream our ceremony on our YouTube channel and dozens of film students from the French audiovisual school 3iS get the experience of a real control room, camera and sound and preparing the visual elements. It looks great on their CVs and we have a record of the evening anybody with an internet connection can enjoy in real-time or after the fact.

TFV: Why are the awards important?

Nesselson: Well, we’re impervious to influence or campaigning, so the results are always sincere. A few times we’ve awarded films or performances that we liked but that escaped the notice of Cesar voters because many of them are busy professionals and they tended to limit their viewing to the contents of the DVD screeners, which producers had to pay to be part of to offset manufacturing. (Now they use links). We were ferreting out films in theaters.

TFV: What plans are there going forward?

Nesselson: It’s been gratifying to see our ceremony become, if not a hot ticket, then certainly a much warmer one than it used to be. ´For Your Consideration’ ads only go back about a decade in France so it’s kind of thrilling to see our logo alongside winners that are eligible for the Cesars. France doesn’t have all that many awards — it would be utter hyperbole to talk about ´awards season’ — which means it’s nice to be ‘first.´. In large part because winners are genuinely pleased and haven’t given a lot of acceptance speeches yet. I hope we can stay afloat to provide that experience to both established and up-and-coming French talent.