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The 44th PaekSang Arts Awards

Juli 1, 2008

Happy happy joy joy

Korean TV and film stars celebrated… themselves, I suppose, for The 44th PaekSang Arts Awards last week (Thursday, April 24) in Seoul (aired on SBS), and the greater good of all things screen-related, big and small. Not much to say about the “content”, since I must admit I haven’t seen a whole lot of the films and shows honored this year. What with the doom, gloom and general lapse in enthusiasm around the pop culture industry these days, there was something vaguely vacant about the display of glamor at the event this spring. Or maybe it’s just me. At any rate, you (well, I do) get a sense of a very self-referential, self-contained world in which the bodies of the celebrities have become intensely (not to say, absolutely) sexualized and commodified as such. As a show, or performance, it works of course: it is narcissitic but it does looks very good. And looking good is certainly no laughing matter in Korea.

Red Carpet: Best Actress and New Actress winners Kim Min-Hee, Han Ye-Seul

To go back to the heart of the matter. the awards, the top prize in the film category went, predictably if I may add, to the critically acclaimed crime thriller The Chaser, directed by Na Hong-jin, who also won the best new director award. The Chaser was a suprise hit: with 5 million filmgoers as of now, it is the biggest commercial success of 2008 so far. As far as I can tell, the film looks pretty good and has a strong premise. I don’t know what it is with South Korea and violent crime thrillers, but there definitely seems to be something going on. The past few good films I got to see recently all belonged to that category. Interesting… It is tempting to compare this phenomenon with the persistent/perennial use of melodramatic conventions: as if Korean filmmakers worked best within pre-determined generic frameworks like the melodrama, the gangster movie, horror, etc. Then it becomes a matter of style over substance, or rather of stylizing (sorry about the wording) the substance: it is what they do with the material that makes it or break it – but somehow, melodrama always returns, like the repressed, and gets re-injected in the narrative as the dominant trope. Darcy Paquet calls it “genre-bending”, I think. As good a term as any other. So yes, crime does the trick. More on The Chaser when I have a chance to see it (could take a while)

The best director award went to Lee Chang-dong of Secret Sunshine and the best picture award to Forever the Moment. Lim Chang-jung (Scout) got the award for best actor and Kim Min-hee (I Like It Hot) for best actress. Kwon Sang-woo and Kim Jeong-eun won the popularity vote. And here’s the complete list of this year’s winners: [click ]