Oscar voters gave it the awards for best picture, adapted screenplay, color cinematography, editing and drama-comedy score.
The Big Picture, adapted from a Douglas Kennedy novel of the same name, sets the story of an extramarital affair against the striking scenic backdrops of moneyed suburban Paris and Montenegro.
Jesus Christ, Madonna, Princess Diana have all had their picture adapted and inserted under Che's familiar red star beret, and framed by the same shaggy locks, in a subversive format pioneered by irreverent manipulators of the Mona Lisa.
Should win: Picture, adapted screenplay.
In Charles-Roux's recently reissued "Chanel and her World" (Vendome; $50), a life in pictures adapted from her biography, there is a photograph of Coco at thirty (she always looked a decade younger than she was), posing on the rocky beach at Deauville, hatless and windblown, in front of a weathered cabana.
Davies's last film, Of Time and the City (2008), was a withering documentary about the sad decline of his hometown, Liverpool, and it followed two feature pictures adapted from American novels set at different times and in different American milieux, John Kennedy Toole's The Neon Bible and Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth.
The dozen titles will include "The Gruffalo's Child," a British film adapted from the picture books about the whimsical beast the Gruffalo; "Balloon Moon," a dreamy adventure from Portugal; and "Twist & Shout," a Japanese piece about two puppets shooting a Beatles cover at Abbey Road.
Though the film didn't win best picture, its adapted screenplay Oscar is an apt testament to how writer-director Adam McKay squeezed an entertaining, informative box-office hit out of Michael Lewis' complicated book about the global financial crisis.
The film, which was nominated for an Oscar for best foreign language film, picked up six Genies (Canadian Oscars), including best picture, director, adapted screenplay and actor.
And even though decades from now we might not want to remember hipsters, it's a relief that we'll have more to turn to in the historical record than picture books adapted from peoples' Tumblrs.
That anticipation came courtesy of "District 9" — the 2009 science fiction film by Neill Blomkamp, "Elysium's" South African writer-director — which came out of nowhere to be nominated for four Oscars, including best picture and adapted screenplay.
