Baz the Great! - A Baz Luhrmann Fansite

Baz Luhrmann's Australia won four trophies at the 2009 Australian Film Institute (AFI) Awards. The awards were distributed over two nights. On Friday, 11 December 2009, Australia won three awards, as reported by ABC News:

Baz Luhrmann's film Australia was one of the big winners at the Australian Film Institute (AFI) Industry Awards in Melbourne on Friday night. Oscar-winner Catherine Martin picked up best costume design and best production design for Australia. The film also claimed the visual effects award.

"I come from this particular world, I'm a person that works with a number of very talented artists that work in artisanal crafts category, so I'm very pleased and proud to be here," Martin said. "I always think of what I do for a living not as a job but as a vocation. So I'm very glad to be in the company of my peers and have an excuse to drink a glass of champagne with all the fabulous people I work with on a regular basis."

And at the ceremony on Saturday, 12 December 2009, which was televised on Channel 9, Baz Luhrmann's Australia won the award for Highest Grossing Film, as reported below by BigPond. Also, at the end of the night, Baz Luhrmann and Brandon Walters appeared onstage to present the Best Film Award.

Luhrmann's romantic epic Australia, starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman ... won a trophy for being the highest grossing film this year. Australia is the second highest grossing Australian film of all time, behind Crocodile Dundee, taking $37.6 million at the box office in ticket sales, according to figures from the Motion Picture Distributors Association of Australia.

Luhrmann said he was buoyed by the public's reaction to his $130 million epic. "Australian audiences have their own very strong instinct," Luhrmann said. "Basically they make up their own minds and I am extremely touched and extremely moved that in the end despite it all they made up their own minds and they went and voted for the film with ticket sales. They went and saw it. And when you make something of that scale without that, without the audience, you have nothing."