Paolo Sorrentino's Oscar Night: Celebrating 'The Great Beauty'

It was the evening of March 2, 2014, when Paolo Sorrentino stepped onto the stage of the Academy Awards and claimed his Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film (later known as International Feature Film) with 'The Great Beauty'. The film, celebrated and loved around the world, is one of the greatest and most important achievements in the recent history of Italian cinema. Sorrentino has always had a special connection with Naples, which he demonstrated in most of his films including The Great Beauty. On the occasion of the first decade of that historic victory, the Oscar-winning director decided to celebrate the anniversary with a 'carousel of memories' of that evening that changed his life. The Instagram profile of the director, in short, has transformed into an album ten years old with videos and images of that evening. In addition to a photo of Paolo Sorrentino walking the red carpet of the Dolby Theatre in the company of Toni Servillo, the filmmaker posted a video with the jubilation of friends and collaborators at the moment the film won the coveted statue. Ten years later, The Great Beauty remains a very special film in Sorrentino's career: not divisive like 'Them' (Part 1 and Part 2) but neither received with positivity and love as in the case of 'The Hand of God'. A film about boredom, celebrity, cliché, and not immediately accessible that, already at the time of its release, resulted in hostility from the audience. In a period where films and the art of cinema have almost entirely lost their purpose, that of sparking discussion and talking about themselves, Paolo Sorrentino succeeded with The Great Beauty in creating discussion, controversy, reviving and fomenting a debate on Italian cinema still dormant. For better or worse, the director managed to shake everyone, even those who described the film as 'a product created at the table to please Americans'. With an Oscar 2014 acceptance speech that became legendary in which he thanked Diego Armando Maradona, the Talking Heads, Federico Fellini, and Martin Scorsese, Paolo Sorrentino ten years ago became the one who managed to find a meeting between the tradition of Italian cinema and that hunger to tell stories that has always distinguished him.