European film awards: 10 things we learned – in pictures

Helen Mirren, recipient of the achievement in world cinema award and honorary winner of the most classily blasphemous acceptance speech in five years, is returning to play the Queen. Not in a movie but in a play, scripted by Peter Morgan and directed by Stephen Daldry, and focusing on her Maj's relations with her 12 (and counting) prime ministers
Photograph: Darrin Zammit Lupi/Pool/EPA

Michael Haneke was 'very impressed' by the Caravaggio in St John's Cathedral in Malta's capital, Valleta. Exclusive: he wore the same outfit to see it on Saturday morning as he did to the awards ceremony on Saturday night
Photograph: Darrin Zammit Lupi/Pool/EPA

Haneke is less impressed by the necessity of dubbing his films into various other European tongues: 'I'm suffering. I hate it.' He would not consider remaking Amour in English, as he did for Funny Games. He uses phrases like 'you don't talk about eggs that have not yet fallen from the chicken' and 'you do not try to sell the bear's fur before it is shot' to bat off questions about future projects Photograph: LINO ARRIGO AZZOPARDI/EPA

It's not a new concept in mainland Europe to fancy Mads Mikkelsen (the presence of whose family at the ceremony did not stop the love-bombing) Photograph: LINO ARRIGO AZZOPARDI/EPA

If the frocks are weird, the plots – when translated into English and read out in heavy accents – can be even stranger. Thus Amour, we were told, comes to a head when 'Grandma starts to fall apart' while Just the Wind tells the story of 'a social worker who is gang-raped in a postcard from hell'. Wish you were here! Photograph: LINO ARRIGO AZZOPARDI/EPA

There was much energetic Teutonic japery from host Anke Engelke. But the ceremony differed from the Oscars in curious cultural ways. There's something strikingly, distractingly gentile about the European film awards
Photograph: Darrin Zammit Lupi/Pool/EPA

Wim Wenders's quiff can survive the dancefloor intact
Photograph: Darrin Zammit Lupi/Pool/EPA

This man's film, Kauwboy, about a little boy and his pet crow, sounds brilliant
Photograph: Darrin Zammit Lupi/Pool/EPA

Big hat, no waffle … Bernardo Bertolucci gave a magnificently brief acceptance speech Photograph: LINO ARRIGO AZZOPARDI/EPA

European film awards embrace the morbid and macabre. The (spectacular) venue was a former hospital, and the mood in the taped interludes, in which luminaries of Euro cinema lamented the state of the industry, was a bit downbeat. 'We're all going to fucking die and it's not that fun,' noted Stellan Skarsgård Photograph: Darrin Zammit Lupi/Reuters