Four Blocks in the Grand Hyatt
About two hundred people in a room at the Grand Hyatt in Berlin, and the Jupiter Award ceremony felt exactly that size—almost cozy for an event that had processed 430,000 public votes. These things usually perform grandeur for a crowd that outnumbers the talent; this one felt more like a gathering of people who actually knew each other.
The Jupiter Award has been handed out by Cinema and TV Spielfilm magazines for nearly four decades, making it one of the older audience-voted film prizes in German media. This year the national acting prizes went to Emilia Schüle for her role in Jugend ohne Gott and Elyas M’Barek as the perennial classroom disaster Zeki Müller in Fack Ju Göhte 3—which also took best national film, and fine, 430,000 people voted. On the TV side, Anke Engelke and Louis Hofmann won for Tödliche Geheimnisse and Dark respectively. Internationally, the acting prizes went to Gal Gadot for Wonder Woman and Dwayne Johnson for Baywatch.
The result that actually mattered to me: 4 Blocks winning best German TV series. Kida Khodr Ramadan’s performance as the patriarch of an Arab-German crime family in Berlin is exactly the kind of character German television has spent years being too cautious to center a show around—morally complicated, not redeemed by the final episode, embedded in a city that actually exists. And Dark, the Netflix time-travel mystery that had been quietly becoming one of the best genre series anywhere, won in the drama category. Two German series, both genuinely worth watching, in the same room on the same night. That doesn’t happen often enough.