French 'Oscars' ignore top attraction

The César awards - the French equivalent of the Oscars - have snubbed the best loved, and most successful, French movie of recent times and given four top awards to a film few people have heard of.

The César awards - the French equivalent of the Oscars - have snubbed the best loved, and most successful, French movie of recent times and given four top awards to a film few people have heard of.

The great beneficiary was L'Esquive (The Dodge), about a multi-racial group of teenagers in a poor suburb of Paris discovering the delights of the 18th-century, French classical, comic playwright Marivaux, which sold 300,000 tickets. The big loser at Saturday night's awards ceremony was Les Choristes, about a choir in a school for wayward boys in the 1940s, which defied Hollywood single-handedly and dominated the French box office, selling 8.6 million tickets.