Awards bestowed upon the team’s films include 23 Academy Awards including Best Actress (Emma Thompson, Howards End), Best Actor (Philip Seymour Hoffman, Capote), Best Supporting Actress (Marcia Gay Harden, Pollock), Best Original Screenplay (Pedro Almodóvar, Talk to Her) and Best Feature Documentary (Anne Frank Remembered, The Fog of War). The team has also earned 90 Oscar nominations including Best Picture (Howards End, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), Best Actor (Gérard Depardieu, Cyrano De Bergerac; Sean Penn, Sweet and Lowdown; Ed Harris, Pollock), Best Actress (Isabelle Adjani, Camielle Claudel; Catherine Deneuve, Indochine; Julie Christie, Afterglow; Penelope Cruz, Volver), Best Director (Pedro Almodóvar, Talk to Her), and nine of their titles have been Opening Night Presentations at the New York Film Festival. This team has distributed more of the top sixty foreign language films than any other team or company since 1960, eight of which have won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film (Babette’s Feast, Indochine, Bell Epoque, Burnt by the Sun, Character, All About My Mother, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, The Lives of Others).
Honors bestowed on Barker and Bernard include the annual Honors Award from the Director’s Guild of America, The Chevalier Order of Arts and Letters from France’s Minister of Culture, The Gotham Industry Lifetime Achievement Award from the IFP (Independent Feature Project), the FINDIE Award at the IFP/West Spirit Awards, the GLAAD Media Award, and a retrospective at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York. At the Sony Global Management Assembly, Sony Pictures Classics received the distinguished Special Recognition Award two years in a row for their continued success and achievement.
Sony Pictures Classics has also played a significant role in preserving film’s heritage. Together with the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences and the Merchant Ivory Foundation, they have restored and released nine of master filmmaker Satyajit Ray’s greatest works. They have also preserved and reissued Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger and Vittorio de Sica’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. In 2006, SPC released eight Pedro Almodóvar masterpieces in a festival called Viva Pedro! throughout the United States.