In Contention

Tag: Afghan Star

  • Waiting on Oscar’s foreign language shortlist

    Niels Arestrup and Tahar Rahim in A ProphetLast Saturday, the Academy concluded four months of screenings of the 65 films in contention for this year’s Best Foreign Language Film award. Today, that tall pile of titles will be culled to a shortlist of just nine contenders, from which the eventual five nominees will be chosen.

    Making predictions here is a pretty thankless task, given the regularity with which this branch of the Academy slights seemingly sure-fire nominees in favour of less visible, and less acclaimed, fare. Indeed, a high-profile snub, with ensuing media outcry, has virtually become an annual Oscar tradition.

    The furore over the omission of Romania’s “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” two years ago even prompted a change in the voting system – to safeguard against such controversies, a smaller executive committee was appointed to add three titles to the six elected by the branch voters.

    It didn’t work: when last year’s critical darling “Gomorrah” failed to impress even the new committee, the Academy was raked over the coals once more. The bottom line, then, is that even the mightiest title can’t be called a shoo-in in this race.

    (More analysis, and shortlist predictions, after the cut.)

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  • ‘Cove’ misses out on IDA Awards nod

    Afghan StarA couple of things struck me as noteworthy on the list of nominees revealed yesterday by the International Documentary Association, which Kris mentioned briefly in this morning’s round-up.

    The five films nominated by the IDA for Best Documentary Feature include “Afghan Star,” “Anvil! The Story of Anvil,” “Diary of a Times Square Thief,” “Food, Inc.” and “Mugabe and the White African.”

    Having admittedly only seen three of the five, I’d call that a pretty respectable list. Still, notably absent from the list is the film that many see as the prohibitive favorite for the Oscar: Louie Psihoyos’s environmental doc “The Cove.” (Certainly, when offering your own predictions earlier this week, only four of you bet on anything else.)

    In a year that has lacked a crossover documentary phenomenon on the scale of last year’s “Man on Wire,” it’s been widely presumed that “The Cove”‘s vastly sympathetic cause and high-profile champions would be enough to seal the deal, particularly when Michael Moore’s “Capitalism: A Love Story” failed to catch on.

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  • Foreign watch: UK enters ‘Afghan Star,’ ‘Reykjavik’ remake

    Afghan StarTwo interesting news tidbits relating to the Best Foreign Language Film race surfaced yesterday, the first of which is the United Kingdom’s bold, wholly unexpected decision to submit Havana Marking’s acclaimed documentary “Afghan Star” as their entry.

    The news is surprising for a number of reasons. It’s the first time the UK has submitted a documentary in the race — perhaps the selectors were inspired by the groundbreaking nomination of “Waltz With Bashir” in the category earlier this year.

    Moreover, the Afghanistan-centered film — which contains dialogue in English, Dari and Pashtun — marks a dramatic change from the Welsh-language features that BAFTA almost always puts forward for Oscar consideration. (Few people give the Brits much thought in this category, but they’ve actually been nominated twice before: for “Hedd Wyn” in 1993 and “Solomon and Gaenor” in 1999.)

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  • Sundance competition lineup revealed

    For those who really want to get an early start in the awards-guessing game, the lineups of films competing for honours at next month’s 25th annual Sundance Film Festival has been announced. As usual, the competition is split into four sections — US dramatic, US documentary, world dramatic, world documentary — with 16 films competing in each.

    Looking down the list of films, it’s pretty much impossible to anticipate hits or highlights based on name recognition alone. After all, the whole point of Sundance is for unexpected successes to emerge out of nowhere. This time last year, who could have predicted that a miniscule, star-free picture called “Frozen River” would be making waves on the awards circuit following a win at Sundance? Nobody. That’s the beauty.

    With that in mind, I’ve selected one film from each section that piques my interest — either I’ve been following its progression for some time, or I simply like the pitch and/or people involved.

    AN EDUCATION (World Dramatic) I’ve been intrigued by this one for a while, partly because it’s written by Nick Hornby, and partly because it stars the incandescent young Carey Mulligan, who blew me away as Nina in last year’s Royal Court production of “The Seagull” (now on Broadway). I predicted then and there she’d be a star, so I’m interested to see if this demonstrates her potential. She plays a smart teenager in 1960’s London who falls under the spell of a debonair older man. Peter Sarsgaard, Emma Thompson and Sally Hawkins are also in the impressive cast, while Lone Scherfig, best known for “Italian for Beginners” (an unusually cuddly work from the Dogme sect), directs. I’m in.

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