The Foreign Language Sweet Spot

Robert here, making no claims to predicting this year's Foreign Language Film category, or making any judgments based on quality. In the life of the mid-west movie lover, we're still waiting for all of these films to show up in our area. But I wanted to make on observation on what is supposed to be one of the more solidly predictable categories this year.

Einstein supposedly said "insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result." So you say you find yourself pretty certain that A Separation has its Oscar locked up based on critical praise and a slew of other awards this season. Tell that logic to The White Ribbon, Waltz With Bashir, Pan's Labyrinth, Paradise Now and Amelie; all foreign language front-runners that had it all come Oscar night, except an Oscar. Whether A Separation meets this same fate is not for me to say.

But consider not what the critics think, nor that Nathaniel is hardly the sole voice to name it the best... in any language. Don't even consider the huge stack of awards its won this season. Instead wonder if it hits the foreign language "sweet spot" that seems to have developed in the past few years. We all know that in the Foreign Language category, voters must watch every entry. This may work against popular films like Amelie and Pan's Labyrinth that are whimsical or fantastical, making them look too slight to voters in the shadow of lesser known but more complex, socially conscious fare. But not too complex, please. The Academy is still The Academy and films with the structural or moral ambiguity of Paradise Now, The White Ribbon and Waltz With Bashir are less commonly embraced than movies with clear messages.

A few frontrunners in the past decade have managed to go the distance, and good as some of them have been, they've all met the requirements of the sweet spot: serious but not ambiguous, complex but not too challenging. Come Sunday we'll know into which crowd A Separation falls. Until then, if I were a betting man, I could think of a dozen other categories I'd rather push my chips into.

Leigh, Farhadi, Jake & Jury Name Berlinale Winners

Remember a couple of days ago when we shared the video of Jake Gyllenhaal handing Meryl Streep her Honoary Golden Bear in Berlin for a stellar career? Apparently he's making a habit of handing over Best Actress prizes. Here he is at the closing night ceremony with Best Actress winner Rachel Mwanza.

This 14 year old Congolese actress played a child soldier in a brutal sounding movie called War Witch.

MAIN PRIZES
The jury this year was headed by the brilliant Mike Leigh. The jury included Jake Gyllenhaal, Anton Corbijn, Charlotte Gainsbourg, François Ozon, Boualem Sansal, Barbara Sukowa and last year's Golden Bear recipient Asghar Farhadi (A Separation) who will now presumably have to jump on a Berlin to Los Angeles flight to prepare for the Oscars.

Prizes, Gay Films and a Possible Danish Oscar Submissions after the jump

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Bullhead.

Jose on one of this year's Foreign Film nominees...

The steaks in Bullhead are so red that you can practically taste the blood coming out of them. The intensity of their color is such that you can’t look away whenever a piece of meat is onscreen. They look both enticing and completely disgusting which makes sense given that meat is this film's currency of choice. Director Michael R. Roskam’s debut is a dark, complex thriller that breathes new life into the coming-of-age story and the gangster drama by setting it in the unexplored world of cattle farming.

Jacky Vanmarsenille (Matthias Schoenaerts) is a young cattle farmer who is dragged unwillingly into the underworld of hormone trafficking after getting involved with a corrupt beef trader. A mysterious murder brings Jacky’s childhood friend, Diederik (Jeroen Perceval), back into his life and threatens to reveal a secret he’s been hiding for over two decades.

Roskam weaves a deceptively simple tale about the loss of innocence that works because he subverts the notions of the genre, giving us a movie that questions if the events in our past can fully determine our future. Anchored by Schoenaert’s masterful committed performance (he gained over 60 pounds of muscle for the part) the film also works as a fascinating character study. Jacky is addicted to hormones and has become a minotaur of sorts, a man who suppresses his humanity at will to let out his inner animal. Schoenaert could’ve easily relied on his character’s past to build a performance filled with quirks. Instead he interiorizes all the pain only to release it through a shattering series of confused glances. He always looks as if he’s a werewolf about to transform.

The film transforms into something more than an effective thriller. At the center of Bullhead is something else altogether, a surprising brilliant study of sexual identity. What makes someone a “man”. While other movies have explored this question through metaphors, Roskam goes to the core of the situation creating a perfect companion piece to Pedro Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In. Bullhead could’ve been merely sensationalist but is instead chilling. The director not only points out that the cruelty of violence is often unseen, but he also reveals sexism embedded in the way we speak. Children often hear their parents say they will “become men” someday but rarely understand what this truly means. Is manhood a meritocracy? Should a piece of meat really define you?

Oscar analysis: Bullhead is a surprising inclusion among this year’s Best Foreign Language Film nominees because of its disturbing plot and violence. It feels like one of those  “special” movies chosen by the executive committee and as such joins the ranks of Gotz Spielmann’s Revanche  and Yorgos Lanthimos’ Dogtooth in terms of 'the nomination is enough of an honor given its unlikelihood to have happened in the first place'. Though Bullhead probably has no chance of winning its combination of genre awesomeness and impressive central performance make it an exemplary work of art. It will undoubtedly be remade in English in a few years. 

Naked Gold Man: Final Oscar Predictions !

I've never been good at math so predicting this year's Oscar race feels especially challenging. You can tell me that a picture requires 5% of #1 votes or that it's 10% or 406 votes or that you need #2 or #3 placements on 69.3% of ballots with odd #1 choices that weren't already tossed aside... None of it will really sink in. For the first time in well over a decade, I had a flashback to my high school algebra class and how my friends (who were in calculus) kept teasing me about my "polynomials?" confusion.  I hate math!*

But in the end what does it matter? Buzz, also an abstraction, is more fun to play with and closer to the truth for non-mathematicians. Best Picture nominations have long required #1 votes, maybe not in the same configurations but they've always required them. And as Joe recently pointed out on the podcast, we're tricked into thinking too deeply about this each and every year. Who thought Frost/Nixon was the best movie of 2008? Who would ever have voted for Chocolat as the best film of 2000? And yet it happens year in and year out. Focusing too much on #1 votes can cloud this certainty: Any film still being discussed as a possibility this late in the game has a fanbase. The question is just 'is that base big / loyal enough within the Academy to secure it a best picture nomination?'

Mo'Nique reading the Best Picture nominees last year!

What Happens With The Screens Behind the Presenters?
For the first time in modern history we'll have no idea until the names are read whether there will be five, six, seven, eight, nine or ten nominees. In past years when they announced the nominees you'd see the blank boxes where the nominees would be revealed while they read out the names. You knew, for instance, if there would be 3 or 5 animated nominees by how many boxes were there even if you hadn't been paying attention to the number of eligible pictures released.

My current hourly obsession is wondering whether we'll be tipped off to how many pictures there are seconds before we hear the titles...

When we knew there would be ten they simply appeared as they were read but there weren't actually boxes behind the announcers to be filled in as there were in years with five. You follow? So this year if there are, say, 6 nominees will we first see the empty boxes and KNOW there will be six before the names are read? 

PICTURE
If we only had five nominees, this race would be easy to call. Our nominees would be: The Artist, The Descendants, The Help, Hugo, and Midnight in Paris. And in that order of likelihood. (My preference order, just as reminder from my year in review, would be The Artist, Midnight in Paris, The Help, Hugo and The Descendants.) I believe the nomination tally hierarchy is going to be Hugo, The Artist, and The Help way out in front of other films. Moneyball would, I think, be the spoiler in a traditional shortlist year. No matter how you feel about those films on an individual basis, as a group that's a pretty beautiful spread of the film year: message movies, family dramas, cinematic novelties, smart comedies and releases stretching from summer to Christmas, from critical triumphs to sleeper hits. It's representative and we like the Oscars that way.

More after the jump...

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Foreign Film Finalists: "A Separation" Sheds Many of Its Chief Rivals

With just six days until Oscar nominations, the Academy has released the finalist list for Best Foreign Language Film. Iran's wondrous A Separation (see my top ten list) might just go all the way. While it's true that most pundits are already predicting just that, I've been more cautious. Masterpieces are often tripped up in this category by more heartwarming or traditonally baity mass-appeal films in the final heat. The biggest surprise here might be the omission of Lebanon's 'can't we all get along' musical Where Do We Go Now? which some pundits, including myself, had suspected might be a real threat given its populist pull. It won the People's Choice at Toronto which generally bodes well for Oscar traction. Not this time.

Poland's "In Darkness" is "A Separation"'s chief rival now; it's a Holocaust drama.

The Finalist List

• Belgium (5 noms) "Bullhead" Michael R. Roskam
• Canada (5 noms | 1 win) "Monsieur Lazhar" Philippe Falardeau
• Denmark (8 noms | 3 wins) "Superclásico" Ole Christian Madsen (I'm a fan)
• Germany (16 noms | 3 wins)  "Pina," Wim Wenders
• Iran (1 nomination)  "A Separation" Asghar Farhadi (#1 of the Year)
• Israel (9 nominations) "Footnote" Joseph Cedar
• Morocco (never nominated) "Omar Killed Me" Roschdy Zem
• Poland (8 nominations) "In Darkness" Agnieszka Holland
• Taiwan (3 noms | 1 win) "Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale" Wei Te-sheng

Omissions
Lebanon's entry is not the only high profile entry to be shown the door. France's amazing Declaration of War -- which obliterates 50/50 on the cancer dramedy battleground -- was probably too contemporary and eccentric for Oscar's foreign volunteer committees. Mexico's lauded Miss Bala about a would be beauty queen struggling to survive a drug war is probably the snub that will prompt the most anger from film buffs. I do wonder if Miss Bala had stuck to its original release plans (it was supposed to open in 2011) if it might have built up enough of a reputation to avoid being set aside here. Finally, there's at least three auteurist cinephile darlings on this cutting room floor: Finland's Le Havre, Turkey's Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, and Hungary's The Turin Horse. 

Records To Be Broken
The dance documentary Pina is still gunning for a fascinating record. It might become the first film to ever be nominated in both the documentary and foreign language film categories... and though I'd have to triple check I believe it would be the first documentary every nominated for Best Foreign Film even if it loses out on the documentary shortlist.

Morocco is the only country that might be looking at a first time nomination.

Our favorite Israeli actor (not that we're that familiar with a plethora of them) Lior Ashkenazi (Late Marriage, Walk on Water) in "Footnote"

Israel has been on a roll with Oscar. If Footnote is nominated it will be the fourth Israeli film in five years to score a nomination. Their previous best run was from 1971 through 1977 when they scored four nominations. Despite frequent nominations they've never won the gold making them the Deborah Kerr or Peter O'Toole of the foreign film Oscars.

If Taiwan is nominated a fourth time this year for their battle epic it will be the first time they've ever been nominated outside of the Ang Lee filmography.

CURRENT PREDICTIONS