The mark of a true Oscar geek is the self-assignment of nuttily completist viewing exercises. Only a select few understand the drive to track down every Oscar-affiliated titles in existence — however obscure, expensive or awful — all so one can say with absolute authority who should have won, say, Best Actor in 1952. (Alec Guinness, since you ask.)
As small an achievement as it appears to the uninitiated, I remember the sense of triumph I felt upon excavating a VHS copy of “Cavalcade,” then the last remaining Best Picture winner I hadn’t seen. (Triumph soon turned to agony as I actually watched the film, but I prefer to forget that.)
So I doff my hat to Variety critic Peter Debruge. Inspired by a montage in the 2007 Academy Awards broadcast — see, the montages aren’t completely useless after all — Debruge set himself the task of watching every Best Foreign Language Film winner in Oscar history, encompassing 61 titles ranging from the canonized to the buried.
What he found — as I did when I compiled my Top 10 list of the category’s greatest winners — was that, despite the bad rap the category gets (and mostly deserves) these days, there is a healthy peppering of masterworks across the list of former winners, particularly in its earliest days, when the likes of “The Bicycle Thief,” “Forbidden Games,” “La Strada” and “Rashomon” gave the award a very good name indeed.
For Debruge, however, the rot set in during the 1960s:
Questionable winners started to sneak in. Mushy French melodrama “Sundays and Cybele,” a Stateside hit in 1962, won (submitted over Francois Truffaut’s far superior “Jules et Jim”). De Sica’s overripe “Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow” (1964) trumped the existential masterpiece “Woman in the Dunes,” while massive French phenom “A Man and a Woman” (1966) bested “The Battle of Algiers.”
The category was fast devolving into a popularity contest, with the B.O. sensations beating what many thought was their more deserving competition. My two most satisfying discoveries — 1978’s “Get Out Your Handkerchiefs,” a nutty menage a trois from French provocateur Bertrand Blier, and 1985’s “The Official Story,” a wrenching look at the children of political dissidents put up for adoption during Argentina’s Dirty War — fall during this questionable period.
He’s right in saying this marks the beginning of the Academy’s still-prevalent affinity for softer, less rigorous fare. He doesn’t mention, however, that they continued to interrupt this pattern with sporadically bold choices like “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.” (Still, I’m glad he singles out “The Official Story,” one of the category’s most undervalued winners.)
Still, the “popularity contest” he describes from the 60s is nonetheless preferable to the situation the Best Foreign Language Film finds itself in these days, where winners are often favored by neither the critics nor the public. (“A Man and a Woman” may not be “The Battle of Algiers,” but it’s still a fine crossover film — and, lest we forget, a Palme d’Or winner too.)
Bringing the conversation round to this year, after the back-to-back shrugs of “The Counterfeiters” and “Departures,” I am wondering if even the napping voters on the Academy’s foreign-language committee might feel the slightest pressure to honor something with a little more cred. 2006 served up a tight race between two critically esteemed titles, after all. It can be done.
The fact that even the genteel National Board of Review voters responded to “A Prophet” bodes well for the film, which I initially feared might be too spiky and blood-soaked for Academy sensibilities. The French Oscar entry has had a good week, landing the NBR prize, a Spirit nomination and the top spot in Sight & Sound’s list, all at the expense of its Cannes rival “The White Ribbon,” the film many pundits have installed as the one to beat. (Did Sony Classics pick the wrong film to open for a 2009 Oscar-qualifying run?)
It’d be interesting to see these two slug it out the entire season, all the way up to March 7. That’s not to say those are the only two worthy titles in the running, but it’s that kind of race the foreign-language Oscar needs to claw back some relevance — and to ensure the Oscar completists of the future have some pleasant discoveries to make.
Comments
11 responses to “Variety reflects on foreign Oscar history”
The downfall has always been that the selections have been made solely based on what each country has submitted, rather than selecting from the whole crop.
Surely sorting through “all” foreign films would be an impossible task, but they could easily expand it to encompass submitted films plus foreign-language films that have played for at least a week in LA/NY during that year (that are subsequently submitted by their distributor, much like the “regular” films).
Hey, I actually like Cavalcade, it was also the last one I tracked down and I think its highly undervalued… but that’s neither here nor there.
I’ve wanted to do this many times but some of them are incredibly hard to find. I still can’t even track down Investigation of a Citizen Beyond Suspicion!
Oh, and for the record, of the 29 winners I’ve seen, Get Out Your Handkerchiefs is probably the worst…
“Nights of Cabiria”… possibly the best win in the category. “Pelle the Conqueror” is also a masterful, sadly undervalued film that is actually one of my personal favorites. Max von Sydow had hardly been better.
I wonder for how many Oscar-nuts “Cavalcade” was the last Best Picture seen. I wouldn’t call it agonizing so much as delightfully ridiculous; when a movie is that bad, you can’t help but laughing.
8 1/2 is probably my favorite, though I cringe a bit at the French/Italian domination of the winners and nominees. The Official Story is wonderful, and also one of my first foreign films as a kid.
I agree the A Prophet should have been released this year by SPC. Specially this being the end of the decade, it will miss all Best of year (and decade) critics polls. At this rate, it might have easily taken the no. 1 spot.
This year seems to be a pretty weak year atleast for American cinema. Maybe A Prophet could have gained some traction. It might even have won Best Picture from a couple of critics groups. But Guy, are you hitting on The White Ribbon? ;-) Isn’t White Ribbon great as well?
The 2 seem to be like the European counterpart to the 2007 double bill of There Will Be Blood & No Country, 2 violent masterpieces by established auteurs.
Not knocking “The White Ribbon” at all — it’s excellent, which is why I’d like to see them both in the mix.
But from a strategic point of view, I think its appeal might have been overestimated. “A Prophet” is the warmer, more approachable work. (I personally think it’s a better film, but that’s neither here nor there.)
So here’s what I don’t get: they invite all kinds of people to join the academy to make it a diverse group that makes varied choices (i.e. they balance out all the old geezers with younger filmmakers, actors, etc. even if they don’t exactly have an academy-friendly track record).
And then they allow anyone who sees all the foreign language films at the screenings to vote, knowing it’s only the old geezers who don’t make films anymore and have too much time on their hands, making it a very exclusive (and excluding) club.
Then they also have some rule that you’re supposed to see all the films in the categories members vote in, but they don’t have to attend the screenings or prove it. And they know Brad Pitt or Reese Witherspoon or Matt Damon are gonna stop making movies for a month because they still have 50 screeners to watch so they can vote. And they don’t penalize old geezers who go on tv and actually say they violate the rule by voting for best picture when they didn’t see “the gay cowboy movie” because they knew they wouldn’t like it.
Either they should allow all members to vote for best foreign language film (which would help popular choices, but put a lot of smaller or less hyped-up releases at a disadvantage), or they should invite a panel to vote on these films, but make the names public, and go for a diverse group of filmmakers who add prestige, similar to the way film festival jurys are selected (so not a bunch of old geezers, but a balanced group of all ages and nationalities).
Bing147: Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion is available on DVD in Italy – but I don’t think it has English subtitles.
I don’t know why Departures always seems to get bum rap. I personally adored it when I saw it.
I agree when Mr. Debruge says: “Everything depends on the film each country selects, and those decisions are fraught with politics”.
Now in Chile we have that problem. Dramedy “The maid” is the most promising and well regarded chilean picture of the year, with more than 30 international nominations and wins at date (Sundance, Gothams, NBR), and even possibilites of an Oscar nomination for Catalina Saavedra as best actress…
But our officially Oscar-submissed film is “Dawson: Isla 10”, a political film about Pinochet’s dictatorship (based in the autobiography of a former public works minister of our current government). Is a fine picture, but it hasn’t even been released in USA, and everybody doubt it has any posssibility.