Tinsel Town's Ring of Stars
by Christopher Booker

Eager to muscle in on the glory of the Oscars, the European Commission was quick last week to boast of its connection to no fewer than three. "Once again an Oscar flies the flag for European Cinema," proclaimed Vivane Reding, the EU's media Commissioner, when the prize for the best foreign language film went to a German production, for which Brussels had chipped in £500,000 of EU tax payers' money to subsidise its DVD distribution.

Another Oscar went to a form of software, again EU subsidised, which enables film-makers to delete from the screen "any actors, wires or other objects which the director would rather not reveal to the viewer" (one can see why the Commission would like such techniques).

Most bizarrely, the EU claimed credit for Al Gore's planet-saving commercial, An Inconvenient Truth, winner of the best documentary award, on the amazingly tenuous grounds that it had subsidised research into Arctic ice-cores which Gore used in his film as "evidence".

No credit was claimed for Helen Mirren. Presumably the fact that her film did not need subsidies meant that she was not "flying the flag for European Cinema."
The Sunday Telegraph, 4th March 2007