Daejong Film Awards continue tradition of disappointment with low turnout this year

The Daejong International Film Awards were once again a flop this year, with nearly half of the award recipients not in attendance at the ceremony held at the Gyeonggi Arts Center on Wednesday.

Several seats are empty at the main hall of the Gyeonggi Arts Center in Suwon, Gyeonggi, where the 59th Daejong International Film Awards was held Wednesday evening. [DAEJONG INTERNATIONAL FILM AWARDS]

The Daejong International Film Awards were once again a flop this year, with nearly half of the award recipients not in attendance at the ceremony held at the Gyeonggi Arts Center on Wednesday.

Director Um Tae-hwa's disaster film "Concrete Utopia," starring Lee Byung-hun, swept six awards that evening, including Best Picture and Best Actor award for Lee. However, neither of them showed up.

The Daejong International Film Awards are one of the three biggest film awards in Korea, along with the Baeksang Arts Awards and the Blue Dragon Film Awards, and is the oldest of the three, established in 1962. But the awards have suffered increasing absences from film industry insiders invited to the event and even boycotts by actors and directors.

What began tainting the reputation of this once-prestigious event?

The awards' woes roughly started around the 1990s, when "The Story of Two Women" (1994), a film that had had close to no box office response, won the Best Picture Award at the 1994 ceremony.

A similar but even more serious occurrence took place in 1996, when the film "Henequen," a film that had not been even released in theaters by the time the Daejong Awards took place, won some of the biggest trophies, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Supporting Actress.

A requisite for being nominated to the categories for the Daejong Awards was that the film be released and shown to audiences before the awards. The wins for "Henequen" proved that the rule had been broken to give awards to a film nobody had heard of.

Speculations that "Henequen" had won awards because of the interests involved in the film's production stage, as the Korean Film Council had sponsored the film, arose within the film industry, and the Daejong Awards' credibility started being challenged.

The 59th Daejong International Film Awards was held at the Gyeonggi Arts Center in Suwon, Gyeonggi, on Wednesday. [DAEJONG INTERNATIONAL FILM AWARDS]

Nominations and awards given out during the 2000s were increasingly erratic at the Daejong Awards, with a number of awards decisions still being questioned by film industry insiders and Korean cinephiles to this day.

In 2001, "Friend," the highest-grossing domestic film of that year, was given no awards, while "A Day," a film panned by critics and which also failed at the box office, was given four awards. Similar decisions by the Daejong committee where questionable nominations and awards were given out piled up as the years went by.

Perhaps acknowledging the reputation it was accumulating, the Daejong Awards committee started employing more outside judges for its awards around the 2010s, but more controversies arose as the then-chairman of the committee, Cho Geun-woo, said in 2015 that if recipients do not attend the ceremony, they will be not given awards at all, and the awards struggled to find broadcasters to air the live broadcasting of the event.

Cho was later sentenced to three years in prison for fraud and pocketing 500 million won ($383,000) by promising people seats on the committee if they paid "donations" to the awards.

Most recently, last year's Daejong Awards were criticized for selling NFT voting tickets for trophies and for newly establishing a Peoples Awards, with even the recipient of the award, actor Oh Na-ra, taking a jab at the awards in her acceptance speech, saying "I am surprised that I won an award no one's ever heard of."

Although the Daejong committee had promised changes and a new start to the event after the years of its dinged-up reputation and boycotts due to these incidents and controversies, the empty seats at this year's event seem to prove that the promise was not lived up to.

The organizers of the event told the Korea JoongAng Daily that empty seats at this year's event are because November is usually a month of the year when the calendar is filled with shooting schedules for films that a lot of the nominees and winners could not be present. The organizers also added that the number of attendees should not be a barometer of the success of the event.

"Many of those who could not attend still sent in video acceptance speeches instead, and the first and foremost priority was to uphold the decisions of the panel of judges," Yang Yun-ho, a director and member of the organizing committee of the Daejong Awards, said. "We could not change the recipients because the actors or directors could not make it to the ceremony."

However, it looks like filmmakers and actors' busy schedule is not the only reason that's been keeping them from attending the event. Industry insiders like film critic Oh Dong-jin said unless the event gets a grand overhaul, the future looks bleak.

"The Daejong Awards need to go back to the basics and focus on matching the public at eye level," Oh said. "The committee needs to be overhauled with a younger and fresher panel, and the awards need to find again the trust of the public. Right now, they have lost all trust. The event will also need to gain an agreement and a consensus within the film industry. It may take a few years for the Daejong to make that feat."

BY LIM JEONG-WON [lim.jeongwon@joongang.co.kr]