Have you ever wondered how the Academy comes up with the five nominees for the Best Foreign Language Film each year? I am always a little puzzled by the selections and wonder why some of the most critically acclaimed contenders of the year didn’t make the grade. The category usually ends up looking like a case of random selection by a corporate committee, tempered with some bureaucratic public relations sensitivity toward a country’s political and international identity. Take, for example, the case of Bernardo Bertolucci’s THE CONFORMIST (1970), a film that didn’t get nominated for Best Foreign Language Film.      

Here was a film that was a major film festival award winner and ended up on many critics’ ten best list in 1970. In Pauline Kael’s review of the film, she wrote, “It’s a triumph of feeling and of style – lyrical, flowing, velvety style, so operatic that you come away with sequences in your head like arias.” And David Thomson called it, “a great film, very beautiful and deeply disturbing.” Yet it was not the only artistic triumph by a major filmmaker that got passed over in the Best Foreign Language Film category that year. Others left out in the cold with Bertolucci included Claude Chabrol (LE BOUCHER), Francois Truffaut (THE WILD CHILD), Satyajit Ray (DAYS AND NIGHTS IN THE FOREST), Costa-Gavras (THE CONFESSION), and Andrzej Wajda (LANDSCAPE AFTER BATTLE) to name just a few.

What did end up in the 1970 Best Foreign Language Film category was First Love (Switzerland), Hoa-Binh (France), Paix sur Les Champs (Belgium), Tristana (Spain) and Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (Italy). The latter film, directed by Elio Petri, won the Oscar. I am a huge fan of Petri’s stylish sci-fi sex comedy, The Tenth Victim (1965), his paranoid Mafia drama, We Still Kill the Old Way (1967) and the haunting, erotic paranormal thriller, A Quiet Place in the Country (1968), but I find Investigation of a Citizen heavy handed and overly didactic in its equation of fascism with law enforcement (as represented by a police chief). Luis Bunuel’s Tristana, on the other hand, was certainly deserving of a nomination but the other three titles are now practically forgotten and none of the contenders are currently available as a domestic DVD release. So much for longevity and taking their place as timeless screen classics.

Oddly enough, THE CONFORMIST turned up at the 1971 Oscar race – not as a nominee for the Best Foreign Language Film (the winner that year was Vittorio DeSica’s The Garden of the Finzi Continis) – but as a nominee for Best Screenplay (Based on material from another medium). The competition included A Clockwork Orange, The Last Picture Show, The Garden of the Finzi Continis and The French Connection (the winner). My question is are Academy members bilingual? Otherwise, how can they assess whether a foreign language film is deserving of a Best Screenplay honor? Did they read the Italian screenplay of THE CONFORMIST or did they base their vote on the English subtitles for the film? It makes no sense to me and I have noticed that many international films, ignored in so many other Oscar categories, often end up running for writing awards, either as a screenplay based on material from another medium or a screenplay based on material not previously published or produced; among these are UMBERTO D. (1952), GENERAL DELLA ROVERE (1959), BALLAD OF A SOLDIER (1959), HIROSHIMA, MON AMOUR (1959), LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD (1961) – this one alone is some kind of joke, right? – and LA GUERRE EST FINIE (1966).

For those of you who share my confusion and amusement over the Best Foreign Language Film category, here is what I have learned about the Academy’s selection process. First, every country is allowed to nominate one entry to represent them. Then, the Academy members narrow the finalists down to five entries. All entries must reflect the same year of release in their own country. Here’s where it gets tricky. A movie like Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion can run in the Best Foreign Language Film category the same year it is released in internationally. Once the film officially opens in the U.S., however, it can be nominated again in other appropriate categories that year, which explains why Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion turned up in the Academy Award race for Best Writing (Story and Screenplay Based on Factual Material or Material Not Previously Published or Produced) the year AFTER it won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar.

This means that a film like Jean-Pierre Melville’s ARMY OF SHADOWS, which was released in 1969 but wasn’t released in the U.S. until 2006, could have been nominated for numerous Oscars in 2006. (It wasn’t though it did win the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Foreign Language Film as well as a special citation from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association). Another famous example is Jean Renoir’s BOUDU SAVED FROM DROWNING, originally released in 1932; it didn’t receive an official U.S. release until 1967 which meant it could have been nominated for Best Picture that year, running against Bonnie and Clyde, Doctor Dolittle, The Graduate, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and In the Heat of the Night (the winner).

The Academy Awards Foreign Language Film category was first inaugurated in 1956. That year the nominees included The Captain of Kopenick (Germany), Gervaise (France), The Burmese Harp (Japan), Qivitoq (Denmark) and La Strada (Italy), which won the Oscar. It was a exceptionally strong first list of contenders, even if there wasn’t room to include Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped, Grigoriy Chukhray’s The Forty-First and Satyajit Ray’s Aparajito.

But before that, the category existed as a special honorary award which was bestowed upon only one international film each year, beginning in 1947 with Vittorio DeSica’s SHOESHINE (1946). Some of these single honorees have since fallen into obscurity (due to unavailability) or no longer enjoy the critical clout or recognition they once held such as MONSIEUR VINCENT (1947, France), THE WALLS OF MALAPAGA (1949) by French director Rene Clement and GATE OF HELL (1953); the latter film, shot in Eastmancolor, by Japanese director Teinosuke Kinugasa is in dire need of a major restoration (Criterion, please help!).

Over the years the Academy has recognized numerous international films in the Foreign Language category which have gone on to become enduring cinema classics because of their timeless appeal and historical importance. And sometimes the Academy has honored a film not submitted by its own country for consideration in the Foreign Language category for other honors such as Federico Fellini’s LA DOLCE VITA (1960), which won an Oscar for Best Black and White Costume Design and garnered nominations for Best Black and White Art Direction, Best Writing (written directly for the screen) and Best Director.

The Academy has even paid tribute to some of the greatest directors in the history of world cinema with honorary awards received late in their career such as Akira Kurosawa (awarded in 1990), Satyajit Ray (awarded in 1992), and Jean-Luc Godard (honored in 2010).

At the same time, I am often stunned by how many great directors and films have been ignored or overlooked by this organization and how many of the international films nominated have passed into obscurity; many of the latter have often been films selected by their own country for reasons that had less to do with artistry than a decision that included political, cultural and social reasons. See if any of the following Best Foreign Language Film nominees ring a bell? Paw (1959, Denmark), Macario (1960, Mexico), Placido (1961, Spain), Dear John (1964, Sweden), The Red Lanterns (1965, Greece), Three (1965, Yugoslavia), Portrait of Chieko (1967, Japan), The Boys of Paul Street (1969, Hungary), The Policeman (1971, Israel), The Pedestrian (1973, Federal Republic of West Germany), The Truce (1974, Argentina)….the list goes on and on.

No one expects the Academy to recognize any film as controversial and polarizing as Pier Paolo Pasolini’s spectacle of cruelty, SALO, OR THE 120 DAYS OF SODOM (1975), or Nagisa Oshima’s sexually explicit IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES (1976) or Gaspar Noe’s brutalizing IRREVERSIBLE (2002). But the members can occasionally surprise us, like they did for the 46^th Academy Awards, by nominating LAST TANGO IN PARIS (1972) for Best Actor (Marlon Brando) and Best Director (Bernardo Bertolucci). And as recently as last year’s Oscar race, I was flabbergasted when DOGTOOTH (2009) turned up as the entry from Greece; directed by Giorgos Lanthimos, this bizarre, unclassifiable film about a family completely isolated from the outside world by the father/husband is the closest thing to an avant-garde film the Academy has ever recognized.

But for all the small victories that have occurred along the way – Ingmar Bergman receiving Best Director nominations for Cries and Whispers (1972), Face to Face (1976) and Fanny and Alexander (1982) or Krzysztof Kieslowski’s THREE COLORS: RED (1994) scoring Academy Award nods for Best Cinematography, Best Writing and Best Director – the major omissions are hard to fathom.

Some of the directors who have NEVER been recognized by the Academy with an honorary award for their work or for directing a specific film include Roberto Rossellini, Luis Bunuel (yes, he’s received two Oscar nominations for writing but not directing), Yasujiro Ozo, Robert Bresson, Henri-Georges Clouzot, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Ousmane Sembene, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Andrey Tarkovskiy, Kenji Mizoguchi, Abbas Kiarostami, Werner Herzog, Jean-Pierre Melville, Claude Chabrol, Miklos Jancso, Aleksandr Sokurov, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jacques Tati, Michael Haneke, Shohei Imamura, Luchino Visconti, Aki Kaurismaki and on and on.

It still amuses me that Roberto Benigni got a Best Director nomination for LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL (1997), a self-conscious blend of slapstick, sentimentality and anti-Nazi fantasy that somehow captured the hearts and minds of the Academy voters; It also pulled in six other nominations including Best Picture, Best Actor (Benigni won for his performance), and Best Foreign Language Film (it won over Brazil’s Central Station and Iran’s Children of Heaven!)? I can’t imagine that the Benigni film will hold up over time or be a movie anyone would return to again and again. Nor can I imagine anyone returning to Lina Wertmuller’s SEVEN BEAUTIES (1975), another “concentration camp comedy,” that earned Oscar nominations for Best Actor (Giancarlo Giannini), Best Director, Best Writing and Best Foreign Language Film.

Other frivolous, lightweight entries in this category include YESTERDAY, TODAY AND TOMORROW, a mildly entertaining trifle from Vittorio DeSica that can’t compare to his key films in the neorealism movement, yet won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar for 1964 (my choice would have been WOMAN IN THE DUNES), Claude LeLoach’s A MAN AND A WOMAN (it beat out THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS for the 1966  award) and Gabriele Salvatores’ unmemorable eye-candy, MEDITERRANEO, which won over Yimou Zhang’s vastly superior RAISE THE RED LANTERN in 1991.

Not to rub more salt in the wound but consider all of the films which are now considered important benchmarks in world cinema that NEVER got invited to the Oscar ball: The Seventh Seal (1957), The Cranes Are Flying (1957), Kanal (1957), Ashes and Diamonds (1958), The Music Room (1958), Fires on the Plain (1959), Nazarin (1959), Rocco and His Brothers (1960),  Breathless (1960), L’Avventura (1960), Late Autumn (1960), Breathless (1960)….

….Yojimbo (1961), Cleo from 5 to 9 (1961), Viridiana (1961), Ivan’s Childhood (1962), Jules and Jim (1962), Harakiri (1963), Contempt (1963), Gertrud (1964), Andrei Rublev (1966), Persona (1966), Belle du Jour (1967), Weekend (1967), Playtime (1967),  Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972), Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974)…. it’s almost starting to look like the entire catalogue of the Criterion Collection, right?

One could play this game forever mentioning such famous Oscar shutouts as Wings of Desire (1987) or Like Water for Chocolate (1992) but questions about the process will always linger over the ceremony like an albatross.

There is one other thing that has always bugged me – how is it that Ireland and Canada occasional have entries accepted in the Best Foreign Language Film category but not Australia? Sure, Canada usually submits a French language entry but dialects and accents are often as indecipherable in an Australian film as they are in an Irish or Scottish film and I feel like the talented filmmakers Down Under are routinely ignored when it comes to Academy Award consideration. Look at all of the films and directors who were overlooked for Academy Award consideration during the glory days of the Australian New Wave: Walkabout (1971, Nicholas Roeg), Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975, Peter Weir), The Devil’s Playground (1976, Fred Schepisi), The Getting of Wisdom (1978, Bruce Beresford), Newsfront (1978, Phillip Noyce), The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978, Fred Schepisi), Gallipoli (1981, Peter Weir), and Max Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981, George Miller). At least My Brilliant Career (1979, Gillian Armstrong) received an Oscar nomination for Best Costume Design and Breaker Morant (1980, Bruce Beresford) managed to snag an Academy Award nom for Best Writing.

At least New Zealand got some love one year when Jane Campion’s THE PIANO (1993) secured eight nominations, winning three of them.

So who will win the Best Foreign Language Film prize at the 84^th Academy Award ceremony? The contenders are Bullhead (Belgium), Footnote (Israel), In Darkness (Poland), Monsieur Lazhar (Canada), and A Separation (Iran). IN DARKNESS (yes, another film about Nazis and the Holocaust – what Academy Award festival is complete with at least one of those a year?) and A SEPARATION are familiar titles to me because they have been traveling the film festival circuit for the past year and have been slowly accumulating critical praise. My hunch, based on the word of mouth I’ve heard, is that A SEPARATION has the edge but you never know. The real question is which of these five films – if any – will stand the test of time or soon fade into obscurity like so many other contenders before them? And will we even get an opportunity to see them? Then again, were these selections more worthy than the entries that didn’t make it to the finish line this year like Le Havre (Finland, directed by Aki Kaurismaki), The Kid With the Bike (Belgium, directed by Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne) , The Turin Horse (Hungary, directed by Bela Tarr), Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Turkey, directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan), The Flowers of War (China, directed by Zhang Yimou), The Way Home (India, directed by Biju Kumar & Damodaran Biju Kumar) and many others. Only time will tell.

Below are links to the Academy’s rules for selecting candidates for Best Foreign Language Film and a link to ALL of the individual countries’ entries for the 84^th Oscar competition.

http://www.oscars.org/awards/academyawards/rules/rule14.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_submissions_to_the_84th_Academy_Awards_for_Best_Foreign_Language_Film