When the German Film Academy was founded almost twenty years ago, Germany seemed to have finally arrived among the great film nations.
The local cinema industry finally had a form of organization that corresponded to its importance, and with the German Film Prize it also had the means to celebrate its merits.
Every year since 2005, the academy has chosen the winners of the awards, which are endowed with a total of almost three million euros.
Before that, the prizes were awarded by a committee made up of politicians, film sponsors, church and trade union representatives, television people and critics, who were regularly accused of proportional representation, conservativeness and being distant from the cinema.
That was over now.
The new democratic method of awarding awakened hopes everywhere that the best films would actually win in the end.
That didn't come true.
If you review the award winners of the last fifteen years, you will find that it is often not the best, but the nicest or most decent film that has won - i.e. "John Rabe" instead of "Jerichow", "Vincent will Meer" instead of "Drei" , "I am your person" instead of "Fabian".
There are also a few exceptions ("Toni Erdmann"), but they don't override the rule.
And among those who win little or nothing, there are two directors who have never made a secret of their distrust of the Academy and the television realism that prevails in German films: Dominik Graf and Christian Petzold.
Both have big names in European cinema.
An old-style film award jury would not have dared to ignore their work.
The film academy takes the liberty
Important films are also missing this year
So also this year.
The academy's nomination committee has just announced the shortlist for this year's film awards.
Many well-known names are among the candidates selected by the committee, which is made up of equal numbers of directors, actors, producers and representatives of the various film trades: Fatih Akin, Karoline Herfurth, Hans-Christian Schmid, Emily Atef and Michael "Bully" Herbig.
Edward Berger's "Nothing New in the West" is also included, and even Ali Abbasis' Iranian serial killer film "Holy Spider", which has a German co-producer.
There are also films that will not be released until spring, such as Robert Schwentke's cinema satire "Seneca" and Frauke Finsterwalder's "Sisi & I".
Christian Petzold is missing.
His film "Red Sky" was invited to the competition at the Berlinale, which begins on February 16, along with new works by Angela Schanelec, Christoph Hochhäusler and Margarethe von Trotta, and has a start date in April.
On Wikipedia you can read that it is about four young holidaymakers who are trapped in a holiday home on the Baltic Sea by forest fires.
Also absent from the list is Lars Kraume's film The Measured Man, the story of a German ethnologist who witnesses the Herero and Nama genocide in Namibia in the early twentieth century.
After Egon Günther's "Morenga" from 1985, it is the first film from Germany that tells of this genocide.
The fact that Kraume has already won six film awards for "Der Staat gegen Fritz Bauer" in 2016
It's not because of the strict gaze
One could argue that the Commission's selection process is so strict that not everyone fits on the list.
But the selection is not that strict.
Among the 31 nominees are films that have been shunned by audiences and panned by critics, and others that have yet to be panned.
Forty percent of all submissions were waved through.
The fact that Kraume and Petzold are not among them does not speak against their films, but against the judgment of the commission.
It doesn't help: the prize, which will be awarded in Berlin on May 12, is not a German film prize.
It is the prize of the German Film Academy.
The cloak of impartiality that he puts on is riddled with cliques, business interests, sympathy and animosity, just like any other award from a German industry association.
Therefore, if its regulations are not changed, it should at least get a new name.
Not for artistic reasons.
But out of decency.