In Contention

Tag: Best Foreign Language Film

  • WEEKLY WRAP: ‘Speech’ rises, ‘Town’ hovers, foreign list

    • At Toronto, “The King’s Speech” scooped the Audience Award, recently a harbinger of Oscar success. (Days later, a trailer landed.)

    • This week’s Off the Carpet pondered the film’s rosy awards outlook, but also warned of the fickle nature of frontrunner status.

    • Guy’s seasonal Oscar column, The Long Shot, kicked off with a reminder to put the movies first. (He also tested the waters with some predictions.)

    • Following an unexpected display of box office muscle from “The Town,” we wondered how far it can go in the Oscar race.

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  • Susanne Bier’s latest in foreign Oscar hunt

    One week from the deadline and the Best Foreign Language Film submissions are coming in thick and fast — our updated list currently boasts 44 titles. The number of those titles I’ve actually seen is, regrettably, still in the single digits, but it does include one of today’s arrivals to the race, India’s “Peepli Live” — which coincidentally also opens in the UK today.

    I’d like to say supportive things about Anusha Rizvi’s well-intentioned but controversial media satire, which premiered in competition on Sundance and has been warmly received on the festival circuit, but I’m afraid I found it a pretty listless affair: the film takes on the potentially rich dramatic subject of farmers committing suicide to gain government aid for their families, but veers crudely between action and subtext without balancing them at once.

    Despite a vast film industry, India has accrued a scant three nominations in this category; though respect for “Peepli Live” is widespread, I somehow sense a fourth isn’t on the cards.

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  • Israel, Bosnia among latest foreign Oscar submissions

    I know a couple of you have been curious about what Israel submits as its Best Foreign Language Film contender, given that the country been on something of an Oscar hot streak of late — securing nominations in each of the last three races, though the country remains the most-nominated in the category’s history never to have taken the gold. (Zero from nine, for those keeping score.)

    As usual, the country has automatically entered the top winner at its national film awards ceremony, the Ophirs, which took place last night. Most pundits saw this as a slam-dunk for “Intimate Grammar,” a high-prestige literary adaptation that led the race with 12 nods.

    However, in a sizable upset, it was bested by Eran Riklis’s “The Human Resources Manager,” a gentle, character-centered dramedy about a bakery personnel officer tasked with shipping the body of a foreign employee back to her native Romania. (Thanks to reader Cameron McAllister for the tip.)

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  • France leads latest batch of Oscar entries

    As you may have noticed, we’ve been doing our best to keep you abreast of submissions for this year’s Best Foreign Language Film Oscar — the deadline for which is officially (but not definitively) October 1. At last count, 27 countries have entered films, and we now have a separate page where you can keep track of the growing list. (You can also find a link to it under the foreign-language category in the right-hand sidebar.)

    The most prominent contender to enter the race since my last update is France’s “Of Gods and Men,” also known on these pages as the monk movie I embarrassingly couldn’t stay awake for at Cannes, where it wound up taking the Grand Prix. (We’ll be having a rematch at the London Film Festival next month — I look forward to tackling the film again with more than two hours’ sleep behind me.)

    It’s a wholly unsurprising pick, following as it does the country’s simple selection formula since 2007: just choose the French film that took the highest honors on the Croisette. It’s worked for the last two years running, with “The Class” and “A Prophet” both landing nominations.

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  • WEEKLY WRAP: Venice winners, Toronto bites, ‘Network’ raves

    • Sofia Coppola’s “Somewhere” surprised many by taking top honors at the Venice Film Festival; we took a closer look at the Lido winners.

    • Meanwhile, we were considerably less than wowed by the festival closer, Julie Taymor’s “The Tempest.”

    • This week’s Off the Carpet column reflected on the unusual depth of this year’s Best Actress race.

    • A race that subsequently got even deeper as Lionsgate made the biggest acquisition thus far of this year’s Toronto fest: Nicole Kidman’s comeback effort “Rabbit Hole.”

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  • Beautiful but doomed: Greece submits ‘Dogtooth’ for Oscars

    Last year, I was erroneously notified that Greece had submitted Yorgos Lanthimos’s boundary-pushing festival hit “Dogtooth” as their entry for the 2009 foreign-language Oscar. As it turned out, they hadn’t — and the film wouldn’t have qualified under the Academy’s release date requirements anyway.

    Well, one year later, and here we are again. Except this time, “Dogtooth” has officially been submitted by the Greek selectors, after taking top honors at the country’s own national film awards.

    All of which immediately positions it as one of the best films in the running for the Academy Award, as well as one of the longest shots to be nominated — unless the bluehair voters who thought “The Secret in Their Eyes” superior to “A Prophet” have suddenly acquired a taste for pitch-black adult fairy tales of sexual repression, incest and feline mutilation. But here’s hoping.

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  • ‘Life, Above All,’ ‘Uncle Boonmee’ enter Oscar race

    I lost track of the foreign-language Oscar submissions while I was away in Venice, so the entry of my own favored horse into the race seems like a good occasion to catch up. If you kept up with my Cannes coverage, you might remember that I made a slightly off-center prediction while reviewing the South African AIDS drama “Life, Above All” — that it would secure a Best Foreign Language Film nod next year, and could even be the film to beat for the Oscar.

    I stand by that call, and it remains on track: South Africa, seeking its third nomination and second win in the category since 2004, has predictably submitted Oliver Schmitz’s film to the Academy. (Thanks to Bianca Jacobsohn for notifying me.) The film recently had its North American premiere at the Toronto fest, where it seems to have been warmly received, and has already been adopted by Sony Pictures Classics — the studio that dominated last year’s foreign-language race with three of the five nominees, including the eventual winner.

    I maintain that the film’s child’s-eye focus and heart-tugging issue drama place it squarely in the Academy’s wheelhouse — that it’s also a strong film only helps matters.

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  • 9/3 Oscarweb Round-up

    • Joe Morgenstern writes a love letter to Carey Mulligan.  It’s still all happening. [Wall Street Journal]

    • Jennifer Lawrence’s buzz wave makes its way across the pond. [The Guardian]

    • The foreign film submissions are already off to the races, and now the Netherlands (“Tirza”) declares. [Variety]

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  • First foreign Oscar submissions

    I was waiting for news of these to begin trickling in… in my memory, the flood of official submissions for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar usually begins earlier than August. Anyway, we’re there, so expect a lot more of these updates between now and October 1, the Academy’s formal (if not entirely inflexible) deadline for participating countries to enter their films.

    The first three confirmed entries come from Taiwan, Romania and Iraq — the latter two countries awaiting their first nominations in the category, while Taiwan seeks to return to the race for the first time since its sole win, with “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” a decade ago.

    The most high-profile of the three is Romania’s pick: Florin Serban’s debut feature “If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle,” was one of the few critically embraced Competition titles at February’s Berlin Film Festival, where it scooped the runner-up Silver Bear prize. As is my wont at festivals, it seems, I missed it both at Berlin and at Edinburgh, though I’ve heard glowing reports from colleagues of the film, a character study of a teenager, on the brink of release from a detention center, whose rehabilitation is disrupted when his neglectful mother re-enters his life.

    (More, including trailers for all three films, after the jump.)

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  • Oscar buzz (or not) for Noomi Rapace in ‘Dragon Tattoo’

    If we didn’t mention last week’s big casting news of Rooney Mara landing the role of Lisbeth Salander in David Fincher’s English-language remake of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” it’s because a) the story hardly wanted for coverage, and b) I don’t exactly share many people’s keen interest in Stieg Larsson’s mega-selling literary franchise. I find the books diverting but undistinguished airport fare, and the hit Swedish screen adaptation of “Tattoo” a one-note televisual slog.

    That said, I’m fine with any phenomenon that compels mainstream audiences to read both books and subtitled movies — yet I draw the line when people start suggesting that the film should be in line for awards recognition. Deadline Hollywood’s Nikki Finke, however, suggests that the film’s backers sense awards potential for the screen’s original Lisbeth, 30 year-old actress Noomi Rapace:

    I’ve learned that Music Box Films is about to hire an Oscar publicist, probably Melody Korenbrot, to promote Noomi for a Best Actress nomination. That’s right, Best Actress. She’s already won the Swedish equivalency of that for the film. Her new agents at UTA and managers at Magnolia are comparing her to Marion Cotillard, who appeared in a small foreign film, came out of nowhere to be nominated and then win the Best Actress Academy Award, then landed big roles in major studio tentpoles.

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  • Keep an eye on it

    Writing from Cannes in May, I broke form to issue my only concrete Oscar prediction of the year: that Oliver Schmitz’s South African AIDS-crisis drama “Life, Above All” (then competing in the Un Certain Regard strand) will be nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar next year, and could even win.

    “Is it that bad?” quipped some of my colleagues after I wrote this. On the contrary: Schmitz’s film, impressively shouldered by 12 year-old actress Khomotoso Manyaka, takes a measured, moving approach to subject matter that could lend itself to didacticism. It’s a richer, more searching film than Darrell James Roodts’s similarly themed “Yesterday,” which, you might recall, earned South Africa its first Oscar nod in the category five years ago.

    Human-interest themes and child-led narratives often score with voters in the foreign-language race, and between last year’s surfeit of cinematic interest and this year’s World Cup exposure, it’s fair to say that South Africa is having a bit of a moment right now. That was my reasoning behind the prediction in May — and that was before a very valuable player entered the scene in the shape of Sony Pictures Classics.

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  • OSCAR TALK: Ep. 23 — Divebombing the competition, doc and live action shorts, foreign film, etc.

    Oscar TalkWelcome to Oscar Talk, a weekly kudocast between yours truly and Anne Thompson of Thompson on Hollywood.

    Every week inches us closer to the end of the loudest Oscar season of all time. Today Anne and I sit down and discuss the noise of the week, adding our own noise (we went on a bit long this week):

    • Leading off, Anne has a whole new reason to hate “the 10”: members just aren’t bothering with ranking and the preferential ballot, not to mention the rigging and manipulation that goes into making it an impure process.

    • Things are getting “hairy,” as Anne puts it, with a close race bringing out the worst in people. We talk about “The Hurt Locker” and EmailGate and add some much-needed perspective on the matter.

    • We bounce around ideas for dark horse contenders that could benefit from the preferential ballot (assuming it’s taken seriously).

    • We also discuss the documentary shorts at length (now that I’ve seen them all) as well as the live action short films (now that Anne has seen them all).

    • Finally, we discuss a potential upset lurking in documentary feature nominee “Which Way Home” as well as “A Prophet” in the scheme of the Best Documentary Feature race.

    Have a listen below, with a track from James Horner’s “Avatar” score leading the way. And as always, you can subscribe to Oscar Talk via iTunes here.

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  • Stunning fluid master

    I was reading through this Awards Daily post concerning the foreign language film race (wherein Sasha Stone is quite flattering) and a link in one of the comments caught my attention.

    I love fluid master shots.  “Touch of Evil,” “The Player,” “Boogie Nights,” I love them.  Sometimes they’re thematically relevant, other times they’re just a nice way to get through a lot of information quickly, but I’ve always had a geeky film school soft spot for them.  And this became one of the all-time greats for me (even if it is obviously enhanced by digital trickery in the first portion):

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  • OSCAR TALK: Ep. 22 — “All the noise, noise, noise, noise!”

    Oscar TalkWelcome to Oscar Talk, a weekly kudocast between yours truly and Anne Thompson of Thompson on Hollywood.

    Every week inches us closer to the end of the loudest Oscar season of all time. Today Anne and I sit down and discuss the noise of the week, adding our own noise (we went on a bit long this week):

    • Anne was in attendance at Monday’s nominees luncheon so she offers some first-person perspective on the goings-on.

    • Speaking on the clutter, the glut of festive gatherings and contender pitching has hit a fever pitch, so we wax on about that a bit.

    • Harvey Weinstein got his druthers this week as any and everyone desperate for something to write about has picked up on his proclamation that “Inglourious Basterds” will win Best Picture.

    • The original song performances were nixed from the telecast this week, which leads us into a discussion of trepidation over how things will play out on March 7.

    • Finally, we talk through a number of the below-the-line races before addressing the foreign language and documentary short categories at some length.

    Have a listen below, with Jeff Bridges leading the way with a little ditty. And as always, you can subscribe to Oscar Talk via iTunes here.

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    Subscribe to Oscar Talk

  • INTERVIEW: Jacques Audiard

    Jacques Audiard at the Cannes premiere of A ProphetAs pundits continue to posit art-versus-genre arguments around the 10 titles vying for Best Picture, the finest film to be nominated in any category at this year’s Academy Awards is to be found a little further down the list – and it’s one that would bridge the discussion rather nicely.

    Nominated last week for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, and bedecked with numerous accolades besides, Jacques Audiard’s “A Prophet,” is a brazen, brilliant marriage of pulp, prestige and politics.

    A bloody prison drama that phrases intricate social analysis in the language of gangster cinema at its most hardboiled, it’s Audiard’s beefiest excursion yet into the noir territory that he visited in his last two films, lean thrillers “Read My Lips” and “The Beat That My Heart Skipped.”

    Critics have been quick to make comparisons to assorted American genre masters since the film’s Cannes premiere nine months ago , with “GoodFellas” and even “The Godfather” routinely surfacing in discussions around the film. But while Audiard acknowledges his kinship to U.S. cinema – this is a man, after all, whose last feature was a remake of a 1978 James Toback thriller – he takes such talk with a healthy pinch of salt.

    “People keep saying, oh, it’s like Scorsese, or it’s like Coppola, and of course that’s very flattering,” the native Parisian says over the phone, via the translation (and occasional embellishment) of his co-writer Thomas Bidegain.

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  • Don’t wait for the remake

    (from left) Kim Bodnia and Jakob Cedergren in Terribly HappyEnterprising young distributor Oscilloscope was obviously hoping for an Oscar nomination when they scheduled a February release for Denmark’s terrific entry, the wickedly off-kilter thriller “Terribly Happy.” It would have been sly timing, if only the Academy’s foreign-language branch hadn’t killed its hopes at the shortlist stage.

    No matter. Oscar nod or not, it remains a delight, alternately echoing the Coens, Lynch and Hitchcock while maintain a mordant streak of deadpan Scandinavian humor. (I interviewed director Henrik Ruben Genz — a former Oscar nominee in the short film race — in December.)

    The film goes on limited release tomorrow — check it out, and be ahead of the game when the rumored U.S. remake comes along. If you won’t take my word for it, at least take that of Oscilloscope founder and sometime Beastie Boy Adam Yauch:

    I love this film. It is just further proof that Danish people are clearly out of their minds.

    U.S. trailer after the cut.

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  • WEEKLY WRAP: Globe awards, BAFTA noms, foreign shortlist

    Ed Helms in The Hangover• “Avatar” and “The Hangover” took top honors at a very populist Golden Globes ceremony — Off the Carpet reported from the party circuit.

    • The Academy revealed the nine films shortlisted for Best Foreign Language Film; we sized up the race.

    • BAFTA announced their nominations, with “An Education,” “The Hurt Locker” and “Avatar” topping the list.

    • The Long Shot, meanwhile, pondered the identity crisis of this particular awards institution.

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  • Foreign notes

    The Milk of SorrowWell, as I suspected, my predictions for the Academy’s foreign film shortlist were mainly off the mark, though I maintained my 4-from-9 strike rate from last year … so, yay for consistency.

    That said, I’m not terribly surprised by the films that did make the cut. As I wrote earlier today, I knew one of the WWII-themed films in the mix would make the cut — but plumped for Norway’s “Max Manus” instead of the Netherlands’ “Winter in Wartime.” And festival hit “Samson and Delilah” was high on my radar, a film I suspected the executive committee might save (as I’m sure was the case).

    I foolishly blanked on Argentina’s “The Secret in Their Eyes,” a romantic thriller that was extremely well received at Toronto in the fall, and may yet be the spoiler in this race. I’d received word that this was one to watch, but it slipped my mind this morning.

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