In Contention

Tag: In a Better World

  • Oscar’s foreign race hasn’t found the fix

    How do you solve a problem like Best Foreign Language Film? I’m not sure you can, but in the Academy’s case, it’s certainly not for lack of trying.

    The voting process in this eternally dissatisfying ghetto category is now such a Frankenstein’s monster of stages, rules, committees, sub-committees, longlists, shortlists and more committees that it’s a wonder they manage to wind up picking a single film at the end of it all — and rather less of a wonder that said film usually carries the stale whiff of a compromise choice.

    This year’s race, thoroughly mapped out by Kris in this week’s Oscar Guide, looks headed for a typically imperfect outcome — opinions on the five films that make up the category may vary, but few would argue that the overall slate represents the key stories of world cinema in 2010. The trouble set in early, with several of the year’s biggest crossover critical hits ruled out at the submissions stage.

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  • OSCAR GUIDE: Best Foreign Language Film

    The race for Best Foreign Language Film has been covered diligently by Guy Lodge here at In Contention throughout the season. I confess that I failed to see most of the 65 submissions and, as usual, waited until the shortlist was unveiled before I really dug into the titles.

    This category has, of course, been mired in controversy ever since “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” became the last straw for quality films failing to register with a general committee that has, well, questionable artistic taste. The implementation of a band aid executive committee scenario hasn’t done much more than elevate the cynicism surrounding the process, however.

    The nominees are:

    “Biutiful” (Mexico)
    “Dogtooth” (Greece)
    “In a Better World” (Denmark)
    “Incendies” (Canada)
    “Outside the Law” (Algeria)

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  • 2/21 OSCARWEB ROUND-UP: Seidler’s Oscar virgin confessions, Bier on ‘Better World,’ the close races

    • David Seidler: Confessions of a 73-year-old Oscar virgin. [Los Angeles Times]

    • Ageism and the Oscar party Bollywood would throw. [The Huffington Post]

    • Anne Thompson talks to “In a Better World director Susanne Bier. [Thompson on Hollywood]

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  • ‘In a Better World’ trailer

    Following “Incendies” on Tuesday, we have another trailer today for a Best Foreign Language Film nominee seeing a 2011 domestic release: Susanne Bier’s “In a Better World” (which also won the Golden Globe).  I’ll get into the film more in-depth when the Oscar Guide makes its way to the category, but for now, I have to say it’s a stirring, brilliant movie, relevant and engrossing in the most human ways.  Seek it out when it comes to a theater near you.  Click on the image below to see the trailer, via Yahoo! Movies, or watch an embed after the jump.

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  • Greece makes foreign Oscar shortlist, France snubbed

    “Dogtooth.” That’s the title an every Oscar pundit’s lips right now, as Greece’s critically beloved but super-outré submission — which includes inter-sibling sex and feline homicide in its curious bag of tricks — stunned pretty much everyone by showing up on the nine-title shortlist for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. I can hardly believe I’m typing this myself.

    There can be no doubt whatsoever that this is the work of the Academy’s executive committee, which was set up two years ago to give more challenging fare a leg up in the Oscar race by hand-picking an extra three titles to go on the shortlist compiled by general voters in the category. They’ve certainly done their job on this occasion — bravo, guys. (Japan’s reportedly edgy “Confessions” appears to be the second film they saved; the third is open to question.)

    As it turned out, I predicted only four of the nine — not hard in the case of Denmark’s Golden Globe winner “In a Better World,” Canada’s “Incendies” and Mexico’s “Biutiful,” which have been installed as favorites for weeks now.

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  • Predicting the foreign-language Oscar shortlist

    Tomorrow, we get the last of the Academy’s crucial pre-nomination shortlists, as the list of 65 entries for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar is slashed to just nine titles, from which the eventual nominees will be announced in a week’s time. Predicting these nine is a vague and mostly thankless task, but I am nothing if not vague and thankless, so let’s give it a go.

    Remember, here’s the system as it currently stands: six of the nine titles on the shortlist are voted in by the general committee of volunteer voters in the category, based on the scores given at each film’s official Academy screening. The remaining three are selected by a hand-picked executive committee, with the specific intention of “saving” significant and/or challenging titles that didn’t win the approval of the larger, more conservative body of voters.

    This curious system was set up two years ago, following the uproar that greeted the exclusion of critically beloved Palme d’Or winner “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” in the 2007 race.

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  • Five things I learned from the Golden Globes

    Appropriately enough for the occasion, I watched last night’s Golden Globe awards in a celebratory alcoholic fog (the night having coincided with a friend’s birthday) so thick it took most of today to sleep it off — hence the apologetically late posting.

    My memory of the evening’s finer details is therefore about as clear as, say, Ricky Gervais’s, though I do recall cheering so manically for “Carlos”‘s win in the TV Miniseries category (even if the film is, by its director’s own admission, a work of cinema) that I inadvertently tossed red wine in my hair. That, and so many green dresses on screen that I briefly wondered if the collected stylists of Hollywood had been roped into a particularly gratuitous product placement scheme for the weekend’s box office champ.

    The awards themselves, meanwhile, were both well-judged and helpful, tying (or at least tidying) up a few loose ends remaining on the circuit — and even allowing me some minor bragging rights for calling the widely unfancied Paul Giamatti. (For an hour, at least, until my inevitably doomed prediction of a Best Picture upset missed outright — awards season giveth, and it taketh away.)

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  • Frontrunners stay strong at the Golden Globes

    Zzzzz…huh?, wha?  Oh…

    First and foremost, I have to note Ricky Gervais’s work as emcee. Last year’s stint was a bit stale, I thought, but this year the gloves were off. Way off. Which, for whatever reason, I was okay with tonight. The difference between Gervais and Armond White, though, if you want to go there, is that one is expected (and paid) to act like a clown. The other is not.

    And I have to think “That was my favorite film of the year” was a subtle joke. Not that subtle was in his toolbox.

    Anyway, kicking things off, Christian Bale’s speech in acceptance of yet another Best Supporting Actor trophy slid off the rails a bit toward the end as he rushed an impromptu shout-out to actor Robert De Niro. Apparently in the press room he said the legend was “the shit,” so maybe that’s similar to what was censored from the telecast. Earlier in the speech, though, he paid lovely homage to “The Fighter” actor and producer Mark Wahlberg. “You can only give a loud performance like mine when you have a quiet, stoic anchor,” he said.

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  • Foreign Oscar update

    I neglected to mention this over a busy weekend, but the deadline for Best Foreign Language Film Oscar submissions passed on Friday. That doesn’t necessarily mean we have all the contenders set in stone, however — we’re still waiting on the official list from the Academy, which always features a couple of latecomers and a switched selection or two.

    Still, to all intents and purposes, the eventual Oscar shortlist is set to come from the 62 titles entered thus far. (Check out our updated list here.) The most notable submission among the last-minute stragglers is Argentina’s “Carancho,” a romantic legal thriller from director Pablo Trapero — whose previous feature, the strong female proson drama “Lion’s Den,” was the country’s unsuccessful Oscar submission in 2008.

    The film stars Ricardo Darin, a familiar face to that voting branch; the Argentine superstar has headlined five of the country’s last nine entries, including reigning Oscar champ “The Secret in Their Eyes.” The film played in Un Certain Regard at Cannes, where it was rather well-received. I’ll be catching up with it at the London fest this month.

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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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