by Nathaniel R
It would never be an easy decision to select the French submission for the Oscar given how much there is to choose from each year. Their Oscar submission honor will be announced in December but we know now that it will be one of these five pictures which were selected by a film industry committee...
- Cuties (Maïmouna Doucouré)
- DNA (Maïwenn) a woman explores her Algerian heritage after her grandather's death
- Gagarine (Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh) a debut feature, one EFA nomination
- Summer of 85 (François Ozon) a gay coming of age drama which snagged a Best Director EFA nomination
- Two of Us (Filippo Meneghetti) a drama about lesbian seniors who have been hiding their love for decades.
Cuties has the highest profile of these pictures due to all the controversy around its marketing -- though there appears to be much less controversy about the actual content of the film which is, at least in part, about the sexualization of minors (which the Netflix marketing unfortunately ran with). It doesn't mean it will be the selected film. There are always a lot of politics as well as artistic considerations that go in to selecting a film to represent your country. Of these filmmakers only Ozon has been sent to represent France before with his 2002 musical 8 Women, which unfortunately failed to get the nomination.
Most of the films are about French youth, the exceptions being Two of Us, and the Maïwenn film DNA. She's an actress (you know her as the blue opera singer in The Fifth Element) and celebrity whose most famous directorial efforts to date are Polisse (2011) and Mon Roi (2015). She has received 7 César nominations during her career though she has yet to win.