Directors should get the Best International Film Oscar
Tuesday, April 27, 2021 at 6:35PM 
While many aspects of the Oscar ceremony annoyed, quite a lot of elements worked to significant effect. Chief among them, the fact winners were allowed to deliver their speeches with no apparent time limit. I don't know about you, but I love long acceptance speeches, especially those that take me on a journey. On the comedic side, we have Daniel Kaluuya, who topped his inspiring sentiment with euphoric comments about his parents having sex. The miracle of life indeed. In contrast, Thomas Vinterberg delivered a gut punch when he spoke about his daughter's tragic death upon accepting the Best International Film statuette for Another Round. It was a great, heartbreaking moment, illuminating the pain that can exist behind fantastic art.
Considering all that, it's a pity that the Oscar itself doesn't belong to Vinterberg, nor will it be credited as his victory. As it happens, this is the only category where the winner isn't a person…
Technically, countries, not people, win the Best International Film Oscar, previously known as Best Foreign Language Film. It seems a lot of directors get to keep the trophy, but they're never listed anywhere reputable as Oscar winners. The Academy doesn't consider them so. The rule has been in place since the start of the category in the late 40s. Only in 2014 did they even start to engrave the director's name in the statuette's base. Before, it only listed the title of the picture and the victorious nation. Maybe it seems absurd to be bothered by something so minimal, but it feels unfair that not a single person involved with the winning films can claim the victory as theirs.
Because of this, many international filmmakers that one might assume were Oscar winners aren't officially recognized as such. Do you think Akira Kurosawa, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Jacques Tati, Vittorio De Sica, Luis Buñuel, François Truffaut, and Asghar Farhadi are Academy Award winners? You'd be mistaken. All of them directed Best International Film champions, but this prize meant to reward international art draws the line at honoring international artists. Another interesting detail is that all of those directors were nominated for individual achievements in other categories. However, they lost all of those awards bids.
In some regard, their losses can be correlated to the very existence of a Best International Film category. With a ready place to always honor non-English-speaking cinema, voters can feel free to be as Anglo-centric as they want when feeling the rest of their ballots. It isn't to say that all voters think this way, but that the system opens wide the opportunity for such injustices. For example, if the winning film director could claim the award as theirs, we could count Bong Joon-ho as the most honored individual in a single Oscar ceremony for Parasite. He'd be tied with Walter Disney instead of left behind because of a technicality.
Awards aren't everything, of course. Oscar or no Oscar, those directors will forever be remembered as masters of their craft. Their films shall be immortal too, perpetually counted among cinephiles' favorite flicks. Nonetheless, it would be nice for them to be acknowledged by the institution that claims to honor their work. Despite everything, Oscar ends up snubbing the makers of the excellence it enshrines in gold. I'd love for AMPAS to change the rules. Maybe even retroactively count the directors of previous Best International Film victors as Oscar winners. Wouldn't that be nice?
Reader Comments (27)
It doesn’t make any sense. Who do they expect to take the Oscar home and keep.. the prime minister?
This is a no-brainer. Of course the director should get the Oscar and be credited with it. How much does an actual government do to produce these films? Why should a country get all the credit? Even Olympic medals go to the individual athletes, not the country.
I don’t like directors keeping it. In general to me Oscars should not be treated as universal best film category but about Hollywood films and its opinions (because otherwise it would be ridiculous how US centric it is if it was seen as film Olympics or something). The international category is about what Hollywood sees in outside world so it should be about the countries not people, it’s the entire industry who creates them and not just one “auteur genius”. Oscars aren’t that big deal imo even if they are fun that it’s some tragedy the director doesn’t officially have it in their name. And I don’t like changing it after so long either.
I forgot to add but in my country for example (Finland) movies get government financial support. I looked and in 2019 42.4% of production budgets of feature lenght movies were funded by the Finnish Film foundation (it works independently but its funded by government Ministries of Culture and Education) for example (their budget was 24.7 million in 2019 so it’s not like Finnish films are made with lots of money lol). They also promote the films internationally so they get things like distribution and awards attention. Here is info in Finnish (but you can see about the money and names) about the details what gets money too https://www.ses.fi/tuenhakijalle/tukipaatokset/
It’s not possible for the film industry otherwise to compete or even really exist against Hollywood movies. It’s the same in many smaller countries. So when a film succeeds it’s not just the people who made them that made it possible but the entire system, so the country is the winner, not the director.
Fellini and Kurosawa and Bergman ARE all Academy Award winners: the first two were given personal honorary Oscars; Bergman received the Academy's highest honor: the Thalberg award. I actually appreciate the fact that the international film award is not personal to the director, but is a collective honor for the country and the entire creative crew that gave birth to the movie. And that viewpoint was reflected in part by this year's winner, who took time to express appreciation for his country's film industry and the government support for filmmakers and film schools, noting that the award was a reward for that support. The Best Picture award is not personal to the director; why should the best intetnational picture be different?
Davide -- but the Best Picture award does go personal to the producer. That's a solitary individual (or a few people), not a studio.
Chinoiserie -- that is a good point about financial support that so many other countries give the arts (not the US obviously)
Cash -- another good point on the opposing side.
Claudio -- you know that you and i feel very similarly about this. It would be one thing if the studios got the Best Picture prize ... then at least it would be correlative.
It used to be—not sure if it's still true—that the short film awards actually went to the producer and not the director (although often it's the same people). The two directors of this year's Live Action Short winner are *not* the producers, by the way; Lawrence Bender (An Inconvenient Truth, Inglourious Basterds, Hacksaw Ridge, Kill Bill 3) and Jesse Williams (Grey's Anatomy) are two of them, though.
@ Chinoiserie
I understand your point about how Hollywood is so centric and I agree that Oscars are not a big deal but sadly the main movie references for people of many countries are the films from the USA (which is more a responsability of the audiences who watch it than the Hollywood industry by itself, but that is another thing) and the international films "validated" from Hollywood is the ones big audiences tend to watch, not in all the cases as you mentioned a film with success in their own country jumps to Hollywood, most times is the opposite.
I also understand that for terms of financial support, the country should it be recognized but I'm more of the opinion that the director should it be the recipient of an outside award.
As you, I'm gona use an example from my country: in México we have the Ariel awards and there is no foreign language or international film category but there is the Best Latin-American Film category and the recipient is the director. For me is logical because the principal achievement for a movie is thanks to the director, is the only person that interacts with each cast and crew member of a movie.
I'm stunned that some are against this when the Best Picture award goes to individuals (producers). And "it shouldn't change now because it's an old rule" isn't a valid argument, either.
I loved the long speeches and this was my favourite already before he said 'here we go' and opened up about his daughter.
I thought the producer of the film got the Oscar. But now that you mention it - I never see a name next to the nominees and winner. Just the country that submitted it.
This must also upset countries that co-produced the film because only the country that submitted it gets the glory.
Absolutely.
In some ways, the country acts as the producer, with many filmmakers benefitting from national subsidies. And the country is responsible for the composition of the committee that select the nominee that will represent it. And the award is often perceived as a national prize that reflects well on the nation's culture. In some ways, the same used to be true of Eurovision: the winner was as much the country as the performer or songwriters. Have any international directors actually complained that they weren't recognized individually or expressed resentment that the win was also one for their country?
I love long speeches when it makes sense but not when it seems like stream of consciousness.
Vinterberg's speech was not a highlight of my night.
For the first year of this award as a competitive category, 1956, the award did go to individuals: the producers. Carlo Ponti and Dino de Laurentiis have Oscars as the producers of La Strada. I wonder why the Academy dropped that idea from the next year onwards.
Every time we see a trailer for a new Susanne Bier directed movie, we see "From the Academy Award Winning Director" In the minds of the public and the industry she is an Oscar winner just like all the winning directors of Best International Feature Film even if officially they are not.
I read an article about Spanish winners and a comment was that there is no photo of the four Spanish Oscar winners (José Luis Garci, Fernando Trueba, Pedro Almodóvar, Alejandro Amenábar)
In the eyes of the public and the industry, all four are Oscar winners, although officially only Almodóvar is.
In short, from what you see, the winners in this category are Oscar winners in the eyes of the public and the industry, so there is no pressure for change.
By the way I like the idea of the category as a World Cup or Olympics or even Miss Universe with a representative from each country.
If at some time in the future the Academy decides to start crediting the Directors of Best International Films as official Oscar winners (or maybe even do it retroactively) no doubt it should also recognize that the other 4 directors of the films that didn't win the statuette are official Oscar nominees.
I love this, yes, the Oscar should be of the director.
This is not going to be popular, but I would like a extra commemorative plaque that the country can display, at the end of the day there's a committee in the country that chooses which film would represent them.
And Thomas Vinterberg is a sexy daddy too!
At a minimum, the director should get one as well, but I agree it should go just to them.
Looking at our most recent years of Oscars, Honeyland and Collective were nominated for both Best Documentary and Best International Film. Had either film won the Oscar for documentary, the award would have gone to its director and producer. Yet if either film had won International Film, the prize would have been awarded to the submitting country.
The inconsistency has become too obvious to be sustained.
Picture - Producers
Director - Directors
International - International Academies
Documentary - Producers and Director and Writers? Muddy, there seems to be no fixed rule of who gets it.
Animated - Producers and Director and Writers? It's muddy, check out the list of nominees and winners, and it changes, it seems every film is different.
Haven't checked the shorts, but probably is the same.
It's a mess. My answer to this... create the Best Production Award and then award Best Picture to a combo of Producers, Director and Writers that is assigned by the movie team for consideration.
Who would be my all-time favorite winner of "Best Production"? George Harrison for "Monty Python's Life of Brian"... the most expensive ticket to see a film, ever.
I don't know, I think the compromise they've come to kind of makes sense given the system they have where countries submit one film a year. That's kind of inherently setting things up to be an achievement for the nation rather than an individual achievement for the filmmaker and I wonder if they worry that taking the "win" away from the country itself will encourage some of these countries to submit lesser work for some reason or other.
It does always amuse me, though, to think that the Oscar goes to the country. I mean, could countries capitalise on this? e.g. could the Danish tourist board run an ad called "Visit Copenhagen", with the tagline, "in the Oscar-winning country of Denmark"? Could the United Nations say, "We're in talks with Iraq, Kuwait and two-time Academy Award winner Iran"?
"Where are you going on holiday this year?"
"South Korea - winner of the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film".
I think I agree that the award should go to the most responsible for the film and perhaps also the country in some fashion. They routinely give group honors to movies that deserve them, i.e. if three writers or three producers are responsible then they all share the award, i.e. each of them gets a statue and the credit.
So I don't see why the award shouldn't go to the country, as an honor to be housed in whatever is the equivalent of the Library of Congress or Cinematheque, and then to the Director(s) and maybe a significant Producer? Of course, the deserving people would have to be determined in advance.
Everybody who has seen all Int. nominees swears Quo Vadis Aida should have won the prize. Everybody else is amazed by Vinterberg and sorrowed by the loss of his daughter, indeed a tragedy, but not comparable to the 8000 murdered people in Quo Vadis. Voters not seeing the movies and voting only on the hype is the real problem..
Agawaga -- I think you can be sorrowed by the loss of his daughter while still acknowledging the tragedy of what QUO VADIS, AIDA? dramatizes. They are not incompatible feelings. I too think the Bosnian film should have won, but that doesn't mean Vinterberg's speech wasn't an emotional wallop and that people involved in the making of the awarded film should get the trophy.
There can be more than one problem with this Oscar category. Let's not diminish or dismiss Vinterberg's loss because we don't think he deserved the statuette.