1980s Best Foreign Language Film: Personal Rankings

by Juan Carlos Ojano

While we’ve got the 1980s fever on this site with Nathaniel listing some of his favorite films and Cláudio sharing his personal Best Actress ballots from the decade, I will chime in with perhaps the category that is one of the closest to me: Best Foreign Language Film (now named International Feature Film). That’s why in 2020, I started my podcast called The One-Inch Barrier where I - together with guests - discussed this category per year...

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1961 Flashback: Best International Film

by Cláudio Alves

Did you know that Juan Carlos Ojano hosts one of the best film podcasts around? The One-Inch Barrier started last year, examining the Best International Film race, going backward in time. As its penultima season is drawing to an end, I was honored enough to return for my third stint as a guest.

The subject, this time, was Ingmar Bergman's Through a Glass Darkly, which won the Oscar in 1961, beating Denmark's Harry and the Butler, Japan's Immortal Love, Mexico's The Important Man, and Spain's Plácido. Though the Swedish flick about God's silence and Harriet Andersson's general awesomeness isn't an especially joyous piece, this was a fun, thoroughly entertaining conversation. Topics ranged from faith to class warfare, from ironic movie titles to Toshiro Mifune's hotness. There was even time to throw shade at some 2021 Oscar contenders, though I refuse to name the mediocrity in question. Take a listen:

What do you think of this Oscar lineup? Are you similarly drawn to the bleak conclusions of Through a Glass Darkly, or do you have another favorite from '61?

1983 Flashback: The Best International feature race

by Cláudio Alves

Have you ever seen a film so good it makes you happy to be alive? For me, Ingmar Bergman's Fanny & Alexander is one of those films. 

After I guested on the 2001 episode of The One-Inch Barrier, a podcast about the Best International Film category, the amazing Juan Carlos Ojano asked me to choose another year to do and I immediately knew I wanted to talk to him about 1983. Since last summer, I'm happy to say Juan Carlos and I have become friends, and there are few things I like to do more than sharing the movies I love with the people I love and there are few things I love more than Fanny & Alexander. I'd be even more joyful if you, lovely readers, could share in this lovefest for cinema. Join us as we travel back to the early 80s and talk about Bergman's legacy, World War II movies, the magic of dance on the big screen, and much more. Take a listen:

What do you think of this Oscar lineup? Are you as in love with Fanny & Alexander as I am or do you have another favorite from '83?

The Furniture: Yul Brynner Blows Up a Bridge

Daniel Walber's series on Production Design. Click on the images to see them in magnified detail.

Yul Brynner, who were celebrating this week for his centennial, was in a lot of very expensive movies. His biggest year was 1956, with The King & I, Anastasia and The Ten Commandments - a combined budget of over $20 million. But there were plenty to follow. Studios saw Brynner as a generic racial and ethnic “other,” which got him cast in all sorts of bloated historical, international, orientalist pictures. Which also means, of course, that many of his movies are entirely worthy of consignment to the dustbin of Hollywood history.

Intriguingly, though, he did occasionally work beyond Hollywood. In the late 1960s he joined Orson Welles, Sergei Bondarchuk, Franco Nero and Curd Jürgens in Yugoslavia for The Battle of Neretva. A World War Two Partisan film directed by Veljko Bulajić, a Partisan veteran himself, it ranks as the most expensive production in the history of Yugoslavia - and potentially in Brynner’s career, as some estimates push it into Ten Commandments territory...

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Spain's big mistake

by Cláudio Alves

Throughout the recent awards season, I wrote several pieces about the Best International Feature race, an Oscar category that's very dear to my heart. It's also a source of endless frustration for I am Portuguese and Portugal remains the country that holds the record for most submissions without getting a single Oscar nomination. To be fair, that's not always the Academy's fault. Sometimes, the choice submission is so mind-bogglingly misguided, it kills any hope of a nomination the minute it's announced. It's not always that the submitted films are lacking in quality, but, sometimes they're productions that were little seen outside of Portugal and received no buzz whatsoever.

This is by no means a strictly Portuguese problem, mind you. In fact, since we're celebrating the 2002 movie year, it seems like a good time to explore one of Spain's most misjudged bits of Oscar selection…

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