Usa: top oscar winners talk to press

USA: Top Oscar winners talk to press

The top Oscar winners talked to members of the press backstage after accepting their awards. Each answered questions about the films which helped them claim the most coveted awards in Hollywood. The top Oscar winners talked to members of the press backstage after accepting their awards at the 80th Annual Academy Awards. Each answered questions about the films which helped them claim the most coveted awards in Hollywood this year. For the first time, all of the major acting awards were handed out to European actors and actresses. The last such foreign sweep occurred in 1964. French actress Marion Cotillard took home the Best Leading Actress Award for playing the role of French singer Edith Piaf in "La Vie En Rose." She is the first French performer since 1960 to earn an Oscar in the category. The 32-year-old actress sang a song from the film for the media and talked about how she felt when her name was announced. "It feels so good, I'm totally overwhelmed with joy and sparkles and fireworks, everything which goes like 'BAM BAM BAM,' I just ate all these things, and it's happening right here, right now." As predicted, British actor Daniel Day-Lewis walked away with the Best Leading Actor Award for playing a ruthless oil baron in "There Will Be Blood." He previously took the Oscar for the 1989 movie "My Left Foot: The Story of Christy Brown." Day-Lewis is known for allowing long gaps of time to pass between making movies, as he likes to carefully select his parts and prepare intensively. When asked how he evaluated potential projects, the 50-year-old actor told the press that less is more. "In a way there is no thought process I suppose is the easiest way to answer that," said Day-Lewis. "But if you're thinking you're already, in some way you're already outside of it, and therefore you can admire it from a distance and, you can imagine somebody else doing it, or imagine that you would like to see that thing done, but when it happens that you're drawn in spite of yourself into the orbit of another world, there is no thinking. And that's, I suppose-- I mean it's true that sometimes you try and kid yourself like maybe, you know, if we could change and perhaps I could find my into that. But you're already gone. You can't be a part of that thing, that needs thought. You can only be a part of that thing that needs no thought at all I think." Fellow Brit Tilda Swinton won the Best Supporting Actress Award for her part opposite George Clooney in "Michael Clayton." The 47-year-old star, who was born in London and attended West Heath Girls' School along with a young Princess Diana, has forged a successful career by tackling unconventional roles. For Swinton, earning the status as an Oscar winner seemed a bit surreal. "I'm, I really just-- I had a reverse Zoolander moment when I, you know, I think I heard someone else's name," explained Swinton. " And suddenly, slowly heard my own. I'm still recovering from that moment, and I have absolutely no idea what happened after that. So. you know, you could tell me that my dress fell off and I'd believe you, so, so, don't be cruel." Meanwhile, the man highly favored to win Best Supporting Actor did indeed prevail in his Oscar race: Spanish actor Javier Bardem won for his performance as a chilling portrait of a psychopathic killer in "No Country For Old Men." But on Oscar Sunday, he showed a lighter side. "Okay my mother said to me, 'I'm going to take, I'm going to try take a plane and try to get there on time," laughed Bardem. "Make sure that somebody helps me through immigration. That's the only concern my mother had. And I was today sitting down with her and I said, 'Mom, I'm nervous.' And she said, 'Why? They're not going to give it to you. So don't worry. And if they do, just have fun.' And I said, ' What the hell!" The Coen brothers claimed not only the Best Adapted Screenplay, but also together won Best Director, becoming only the second pair of credited filmmakers to share this particular Academy Award, following in the footsteps of Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins for the 1961 musical "West Side Story." The Coens -- Joel, 53, and Ethan, 50 -- were considered clear Oscar favorites after sweeping the 2007 film honors of Hollywood's major talent guilds, including the Directors Guild of America. They got their first taste of Oscar glory 11 years ago with a win for their original screenplay for "Fargo." Joel Coen talked to the media backstage, sharing his thoughts about how "No Country For Old Men" (which won Best Picture) stacked up against the other four nominees. "I think it was a special year in the respect that I thought, I thought that - you know it sounds like a cliche, but all the movies that were nominated this year were really interesting to me personally," mused the senior Coen. "And that isn't always the case. And I thought were, all of them to me personally, I thought were really, fantastically good movies. But I-- in terms of sort of parsing the themes, it's not, something that we really do amongst ourselves, or even, you know, when we're doing interviews either. I mean, we adapted a novel by a great American novelist, Cormac McCarthy, and we just tried to do justice to the novel." And in another win for the continent, Austria's Holocaust-era drama "The Counterfeiters" won the Oscar for best foreign language film on Sunday (February 24), the country's first award in the category. The movie about a group of Jews who produce counterfeit currency for the Nazis in a concentration camp in order to undermine the U.S. and British economies, beat out films from Israel, Kazakhstan, Poland and Russia. Director Stefan Ruzowitzky talked about what the win means to the world of cinema in his country. "A lot, I was surprised to find out, 'cause, 'cause usually, you know, Austria is about opera and classical music and theater," said Ruzowitzky. "And Austrians are not really enthusiastic about the movies. But, but being nominated it was really, you know, for the whole country, sort of an exciting thing as much as I heard. And I hope very much that this award will help us Austrian filmmakers, to sort of make film in Austria strong. Have more pressure on the politicians to, to, um, support the film industry as well."