According to Korean media, the most beautiful moment of the 46th Blue Dragon Film Awards ceremony will definitely belong to Son Ye Jin and Hyun Bin.
From the red carpet to the awards stage, every frame is perfect. The fact that both of them received the Most Favorite Star award, then the Best Actor/Actress award, was praised "like a film scene".
But the award results are controversial.
The Blue Dragon Awards Ceremony faced many doubts when Park Chan Wook's work "No Other choice" won a series of important categories, including Best Film, Best Director, Best Actress (Son Ye Jin), Best Supporting Actor (Lee Sung Min).
Park Chan Wook has always been known as the " master director" of Korean cinema. No Other choice is backed by Koreas largest distributor CJ, and features A-list actors Lee Byung Hun, Son Ye Jin, etc., making it almost a prepared success.
But the actual results were not as expected. The reaction of critics was mixed, the audience's film review scores were only average, and opinions were clearly divided. The film's revenue stopped at 2.93 million tickets. With the formula Park Chan Wook + CJ + A-list, this is clearly a commercial failure.
Although the film still retains Park Chan Wook's signature style, there have been many criticisms for building unconvincing emotions, unbalanced characters and empty stories.
Korean media commented: No one denies that Son Ye Jin is an excellent, talented and famous actress. But the problem lies not in her, but in the achievements of the work, the competitive context and the meaning of the award ceremony.
A film that caused controversy among critics and failed to conquer the public has swept through important awards. Meanwhile, The ugly by director Yeon Sang Ho - a low- budget but impressive film - returned empty-handed.
The most popular film of the year My daughter is a zombie only received the audience vote award. "The Old woman with the knife", a unique story about an female assassin in her 60s, is also left empty-handed.
Public opinion was also surprised when Hyun Bin with the movie "Harbin" surpassed strong candidates such as Park Jung Min (The ugly) and Lee Byung Hun (No other choice) to win the Best Actor award.
An artist manager cautiously commented: When major awards are given to roles that are not convincing enough or have a clear reason, controversy is inevitable. That also puts pressure on the award recipient himself.
The media commented: It is unclear whether this decision is to create a beautiful scene for the awards ceremony, show respect for the big director, or to take advantage of the popularity of the star couple, but giving too many awards to No Other choice is unlikely to make people fully applaud.
The remaining question is: is this the best thing the Blue Dragon can do, or simply no other choice.
