In Contention

Tag: Incendies

  • 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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  • ‘Incendies’ trailer

    While some pundits are assuming that Javier Bardem’s Best Actor nomination makes “Biutiful” the film to beat in the foreign-language category — despite the fact that recent Oscar history doesn’t favor the biggest name in the contest — my instincts tell me the real race is between Susanne Bier’s “In a Better World” and Denis Villeneuve’s “Incendies,” both of which Sony Pictures Classics will release in April. I haven’t caught up with either yet, though this new trailer for the latter is making me even more annoyed at myself for sleeping past an early-morning screening at Venice last year. Click on the image to watch the trailer at Apple, or check out the 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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  • Academy announces official list of 65 foreign Oscar entries

    For the past few months, we’ve been keeping you abreast of the submissions for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, so this finalized list of contenders, which was sleuthed by Pete Hammond earlier this morning (and officially unveiled by AMPAS via press release here), doesn’t contain too many surprises.

    As usual, however, a few low-profile late entries have snuck into the mix since the October 1 submissions deadline, while one film (Afghanistan’s entry “Black Tulip”) appears to have been disqualified, as the country does not feature on the Academy screening schedule. An eligibility-date snafu, I’ll be bound.

    The four titles new to our list come from Ethiopia (“The Athlete”), Georgia (“Street Days”), Greenland (“Nuummloq”) and Kyrgyzstan (“The Light Thief”). I’m hoping to see the last of those — reportedly a heartwarmer about an electrician coming to the aid of an impoverished rural community — at the London fest later this week, but the other three are unfamiliar to me. Always nice to see more African countries in the running, however.

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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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  • TIFF: ‘The King’s Speech’ takes Toronto audience award

    Well, in case you weren’t already convinced, you can pretty much write a Best Picture nod for “The King’s Speech” in ink now. Following in the footsteps of such titles as “American Beauty,” “Slumdog Millionaire” and “Precious,” The Weinstein Company’s period drama just took the People’s Choice Award on the last day of the Toronto Film Festival — confirming that the film plays across the board.

    Of course, it oversimplifying matters to say that Toronto’s audience award equals a Best Picture play; indeed, only three winners in the last decade have gone on to secure a nomination for Oscar’s top prize. But when a film enters the festival with that much advance buzz and then makes good on it, it’s fair to say that the script is being followed.

    The runner-up prize, meanwhile, went to the British-South African co-production, “The First Grader,” an inspirational true-life drama about an 84 year-old Kenyan man starting school — seemingly the kind of  sentimental human-interest crowdpleaser that is catnip to festival audiences, even if critics have been more divided.

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