Chapter 250: The Plans Have Changed - Baicheng's Golden Bear Award...
After listening to Li Sishi's words, Zhuang Menghua lowered her eyes, clearly beginning to think.
If she were ten years younger, Li Sishi's words would have definitely touched her heart instantly, inspiring her with the passion and drive to change the world—but unfortunately, she is no longer the sharp-tongued person she once was.
After securing his position as the second-in-command, the most important thing shifted from "innovation" to "stability".
After all, as a woman who is still quite controversial in this era, she has risen above the vast majority of male employees and shareholders. In the past, she needed a fearless spirit, like a sharp knife, to break through all constraints and obstacles. Now that she has a stable position, she can no longer arbitrarily and drastically change this film and television company that has become somewhat bloated and redundant over the years.
Looking at Zhuang Menghua's pensive expression, Li Sishi could roughly understand her concerns: In general, the decades from Zhao's Film Company to TBL TV City had accumulated a lot of foundation, but also left behind a lot of "garbage".
The current situation is like the "mountain of code" used by programmers in later generations to describe something so old and difficult to modify that it either needs to be maintained as much as possible and continue to be decorated until it finally collapses completely, or it needs to be drastically altered and scrapped from the ground up, creating a completely new situation.
However, TBL is half of Hong Kong's entertainment industry, and the latter method is simply impossible to achieve. Therefore, after Zhuang Menghua secured the position of second-in-command, he changed from his former ambition to seeking only a stable life.
The fact that Li Sishi was signed at this point in time, and that Zhuang Menghua was vigorously cultivating her before sending her to the film industry where her voice was no longer what it used to be, was all because it happened to coincide with the "good" time when the stubborn faction in the TV drama field was attacking her, while the film industry was using a newcomer to put Huang Qianyan in her place.
After waiting quietly for a while, Zhuang Menghua finally spoke slowly: "Your idea is not without reason, but you should know that these award ceremonies tend to favor traditional art films in terms of judging. The better the box office performance, the more those conservative people will 'look down on' them."
It's as if the word "depth" must always be completely separated from "business".
In terms of depth, "The Mermaid's Tale" can be broadly described as a revival of traditional stage plays and a promotion of environmental protection, presented in a popular and accessible way that resonates with the general public.
It's beautiful—so it not only achieves high box office returns in Hong Kong, but is also quite popular in Southeast Asia and other overseas markets.
This brings us back to the previous question: the better the box office performance and the closer the presentation is to popular aesthetics, the less the judges who consider themselves to have superior aesthetic sense will like it.
Li Sishi was certainly aware that the judges preferred things that no one else could understand and tragic literature, as if this allowed them to showcase their unique aesthetic sense—a problem that seemed unsolvable to the people of Hong Kong at that time.
However, the "one-man show" approach to this world cannot last forever. Having witnessed the influence of public opinion offensives in the future, Li Sishi has a greater "breadth" of experience from the information explosion era than the conservative yet open-minded people of Hong Kong today.
Public opinion offensives are a double-edged sword. If used improperly, they can harm both the attacker and the defender. However, if used well, they can be the sharpest weapon to break through all constraints and obstacles.
"The Gangster" is being attacked by others using a media offensive in an attempt to profit from it, and Li Sishi is doing the same, also planning to use a media offensive to increase her chances of winning her first Best Actress award.
After presenting her meticulously crafted plan, which combined the strategies of public opinion from later generations with the realities of the present era, Zhuang Menghua and Lu Yiting were amazed by the novel, bold, and highly valuable plan. They couldn't help but ask Li Sishi, "How did you manage to create this?"
Even those who have worked behind the scenes in this industry for many years found some parts of the plan unfamiliar and new.
Although some of the content may not be as profound or detailed as they know, the breadth of examples from all over the world used as supplementary references is something that many industry professionals cannot achieve.
“My daddy… has a lot of friends abroad.” Li Sishi had already thought of an excuse. “Moreover, this kind of media offensive is not new or rare in foreign award ceremonies. In their view, if you want to win the big prize you dream of, you must start preparing to ‘fight’ against all your opponents early on.”
Although such underhanded competition for awards exists in Hong Kong, it is still quite rudimentary compared to foreign countries where such competition is a common practice and tradition.
Just like Rong Juezhang's film, adapted from a Peking Opera piece and arguably the best Chinese film, it still suffered from insufficient publicity when it went to Cannes. It won Best Picture, but Rong Juezhang and Kong Wei both lost the Best Actor and Best Actress awards—even though the unspoken rule of the awards is to distribute the big prizes as evenly as possible.
However, it is not uncommon for an exceptionally outstanding film to win multiple prestigious awards.
Li Sishi felt sorry for him, but also took it as a warning, always reminding herself not to be confident and think she was invincible just because the quality was good. Instead, she must not be careless and must do her best to strive for the best before the results are in.
Therefore, after summarizing the ideas and materials, this proposal, which was enough to impress Zhuang Menghua at this time, was finally completed and released under her guidance.
There you can "go" without leaving home
Before the advent of the internet age, which allows people to access information and knowledge worldwide, accessing information from other places required either people or physical resources.
Both of these require a significant investment of time, energy, and money to acquire and maintain. Even in a metropolis like Hong Kong, which is already in line with global progress, one is still constrained by the speed of information transmission in this era and cannot obtain all the information one wants at once.
Upon hearing Li Sishi's answer, Zhuang Menghua and Lu Yiting were both taken aback, but then realized something: although it didn't sound pleasant, the gap between people from wealthy and poor backgrounds was undoubtedly widening in this era.
A person's perspective and knowledge base come from their growth process from childhood to adulthood.
Compared to wealthy families who have the confidence and resources to pursue their knowledge at any time, people from ordinary or even middle-class families often find their creative ideas constrained by the limitations of real-world resources. Over time, the gap between them and the former becomes more than just a small difference.
If Li Sishi hadn't risen to a higher social class after her mother Zhou Jiaxian remarried, and hadn't gathered this information through the connections of the wealthy family, even if she was smart enough to figure out the key to these problems, she wouldn't have had enough information to verify her conjectures. In the end, everything would have remained just a "conjecture."
"This plan is a bit ahead of its time. I think Miss Zhuang needs some time to think it over." Seeing the change in Zhuang Menghua's expression, Lu Yiting took the initiative to speak to Li Sishi.
“There’s still some time, and I’m not in a rush right now,” Li Sishi nodded.
With more than a month to go before the Asia-Pacific Film Festival, which doesn't start until March, Zhuang Menghua and Lu Yiting have plenty of time to think things through and investigate.
"While I do need some time to think things through, there's something I think you should also consider." Just as Li Sishi was about to take her leave, Zhuang Menghua suddenly called her back and then took out from the drawer...
They produced something that looked like a script outline.
Li Sishi curiously took the script and saw a story adapted from the life of a female tycoon in Hong Kong: she started by selling dumplings at a street stall and eventually became a legendary figure representing the spirit of Hong Kong. The life of this female tycoon was like a calm surface concealing endless waves and magnificence.
It's easy to see from the script outline that this is a fairly typical and traditional award-winning theme, using the rise of a female tycoon to indirectly showcase the changes of the times, which is quite similar to her later film "Big City, Small Love".
"Regarding this subject matter... are you planning to go to Baicheng?" After briefly reading through the general information of the story, Li Sishi looked up and asked softly.
After she asked the question, Zhuang Menghua's expression clearly changed slightly again: "Yes, among the three film festivals in Europe, the Baicheng Film Festival is the international award that Chinese people have the best chance to compete for."
Before there was Shang Lanyu, and more recently last year there was Shao Fenfen. With the title of "Baicheng Film Queen", her value and hype have skyrocketed several levels.
Especially unlike Shao Fenfen, who was a superstar of the Cantonese film era in Hong Kong, Shang Lanyu could only be considered one of the talented actresses of her time before winning the award. However, after she became the "first Chinese actress to win the Best Actress award in Hong Kong", her influence clearly overshadowed a group of her contemporaries and even her predecessors, and she seemed to be the "first person" in a tacit agreement.
But whether it's a pity or not, after a long talk with Li Sishi today and discovering that her ideas were almost completely different from her original plan yet had their own unique insights, even Zhuang Menghua herself didn't think that Li Sishi could "accept" this arrangement.
Without the performance of "Shen Yun", she could not have defeated all her competitors and won the "Best Actress" award in the final stage of the actress category at the Baicheng Film Festival, which is not overly biased towards actors' hometowns.
Perhaps I shouldn't have let Li Sishi take Shang Lanyu's route to Baicheng, but instead let her take Kong Wei's route to Shuicheng.
As for Kangcheng—
Even Rong Juezhang, who had the best chance of winning an award, failed to win at the Cannes Film Festival in the same year that Li Sishi debuted, despite having what was probably the best work of his life. Therefore, Zhuang Menghua had no intention of letting Li Sishi take the path that is the hardest for Chinese people to win awards.
However, what Zhuang Menghua didn't know was that if she wanted Li Sishi to try her luck at one of the three major European awards this year, Li Sishi would rather challenge the most difficult one, Cannes—because this year's Cannes will award an unprecedented, youngest "4-year-old Best Actress," directly breaking the existing record for the youngest winner of the three major awards, a record that no one will be able to break for many years to come.
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