The Sant Jordi Cinematography Awards, on target: best film of the year 'Love in its Place'

The Sant Jordi Cinematography Awards, granted by Radio Nacional de España in its sixty-sixth edition, have had this year some small variation in the composition of its jury and a great filmic intuition in the composition of its list of winners. A few days before the major awards of Spanish cinema, the Goyas, are presented, the Sant Jordi awards come to signify corrective glasses worth looking through: the best Spanish film of 2021 is El amor en su lugar, by Rodrigo Cortés, a masterpiece that has not been seen or considered by the academics of Spanish cinema, who will see and value it when the time comes, which will be another year.

And the Sant Jordi jury, composed of Catalan critics and RTVE professionals, has made another exercise in clairvoyance in awarding the prizes for best actor and best actress. On the one hand, it has seen and rewarded the least easy, what had to be sought, that is, the performance of Tamara Casellas, impressive in the film Ama, by Julia De Paz Solvas. And on the other, it has not failed to see the obvious, the easy, the irrefutable: that Javier Bardem ---whether he wins the Oscar, the Goya or whatever--- does a job in El buen patrón that makes any creativity to find another performance at his level absurd, just as ridiculously happened at the past San Sebastián Festival, where he was robbed of the award for reasons that are even embarrassing to remember.

The award for best debut film, or best new director, has been given to Tres, an ingenious, intriguing and exciting film by Juanjo Giménez.

The Sant Jordi awards also reach foreign cinema and, in this section, the winning title is Quo vadis Aida, by Bosnian Jasmila Zbanic, a tremendous story in a refugee camp in Srebrenica that won the top European film awards for film, direction, and actress. Don't look for it, either, in the Goya awards; you'll see it there any other year. The best actor was chosen as Benedict Cumberbacht, for The Power of the Dog, and the best actress as the powerful and wonderful Ariana DeBose, for West Side Story.

These Sant Jordi awards for the best cinema of last year will be presented at a gala to be held on April 26.