Hong Kong Film Awards board to vote on changing system that allowed Ten Years to win
UPDATED: Industry association director has proposed stripping professional adjudicators – filmmakers, actors and critics – of their majority vote on awards, amid dispute over dystopian movie’s win and whether it should have been eligible
Under the current system, the winner in each category is chosen in two rounds of voting. In the second round, a group of 55 “professional adjudicators” made up of filmmakers, actors and seasoned film critics account for 55 per cent of the total votes, while the remaining 45 per cent of the votes are cast by hundreds of executive committee members from 13 film groups, including the Film Directors’ Guild and the Society of Cinematographers.
At a meeting of the board of directors of the Film Awards Association last month, Crucindo Hung Cho-sing, who represents the Hong Kong Motion Picture Industry Association and the Hong Kong Chamber of Films, proposed to strip the votes from the 55 professional jurors.
“The jurors can control the outcome if they all vote for the same [film or person]. The opinion of the about 1,000 voting members would not matter, as they only account for 45 per cent of the votes,” Hung tells the Post. “That is very unfair.”
Asked to clarify, Hung explained that Ten Years should not have qualified for the film awards in the first place, as it is not a feature-length film but an omnibus of five short films. The rules on the Film Awards website stipulate that a film has to be “60 minutes or more in duration” to be eligible for participation; it is not specified whether a film comprising multiple segments is eligible.
Filmmaker Shu Kei, chairman of the school of film and television at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, and committee member of the recently formed political party Demosisto, argues that Hung does not understand how the voting mechanism works and is simply hoping to better manipulate the results.
“No matter the judging mechanism, the larger the [number of voters] the more representative it is,” says Shu, who points out that if the jurors’ vote is scrapped, the decision-making process would be dominated by production companies and would not be fairer than the current system.
“Each year there is dispute about the results. But just because you don’t like the winner, it doesn’t mean the system is not fair ... The system was formed after 35 years of evolution and approved by the movie industry,” Shu adds.
Besides Ten Years’ best picture win, the 2016 Hong Kong Film Awards were dominated by writer-director Philip Yung Tsz-kwong’s Port of Call , which scooped seven awards, including a sweep of all five acting categories. The artful true-crime drama’s performance has not been cited as a factor behind the purported change to the voting system.
This is not the first time that Hung has stirred up controversy. Back in 2013, he warned that the looming Occupy Central movement would affect the local movie industry and deter Chinese investors. During the protest, the Motion Picture Industry Association and Hong Kong Chamber of Films took out a full-page newspaper advertisement to express their support for the Hong Kong police force.