Beyond the Multiplex

The nominees for best foreign language film and best documentary feature are ... a quirky mixed bag. And we handicap them all for you here.

By Andrew O'Hehir

Read more: Andrew O'Hehir, Movies, Movie Reviews, Arts & Entertainment, Reviews, Academy Awards, Beyond the Multiplex

Foreground: "Tsotsi"; background: "Murderball"

March 2, 2006 | This year's foreign-language Oscar category is dominated, at least in terms of media coverage, by a late-blooming controversy over a film most Academy members undoubtedly haven't seen. Meanwhile, the documentary feature category is widely seen as a foregone conclusion, given the immense popularity of a film about flightless Antarctic waterfowl that was proclaimed as an example of Christian family values by someone who probably hadn't seen it.

Anybody who thinks these events are extraordinary hasn't been paying attention. The Hollywood establishment's efforts to honor documentaries and foreign films, while undeniably well-meaning, have developed an increasingly buffoonish character over the years. For one thing, there's a kind of taxonomic confusion involved: It's a little like asking a Major League Baseball umpire to officiate a championship chess match, or asking those two sheepherdin' cowpokes from "Brokeback Mountain" to collect botanical specimens.

It's easy to make fun of Academy voters as geriatric, aesthetically unadventurous and susceptible to a certain variety of "message movie." But beneath that partially accurate stereotype lies the fact that America's mainstream film industry is permanently and totally committed to a certain vision of what movies are: large-scale entertainments, whether didactic or romantic or comic or some combination thereof, designed to seduce and manipulate a broad popular audience. There's still a lingering awareness that other possible models exist, but when awards time rolls around, all those possibilities get rolled into two qualities: pretty and earnest.

So while the last 15 years have seen an extraordinary explosion of cinema from all around the world, from the most brazen pop to the most ambitious experimentalism and every gradation in between -- an explosion that at least equals, and probably exceeds, the art-film revolution of the '60s -- almost none of this has been felt on Oscar night. (Indeed, not much of it has been felt in the American market in general.) The winning foreign-language films since 1990 have included movies good, bad and indifferent, but almost all have featured lovely cinematography and redeeming life lessons, from the feminist fable "Antonia's Line" in 1995 to the grouch-plus-kid movie "Kolya" in 1996 to period costume dramas like "Indochine" (1992) and "Belle Époque" (1993).

Hardly anybody would pick those four pictures, pleasant as they may be, as the best examples of world cinema from those years. And hardly anybody would be surprised. As we'll see later, most of the best foreign films of 2005 not only were not nominated, they weren't even candidates for nomination. The foreign-language Oscar has become a kind of curiosity: What examples of Old World inoffensiveness can those geezers dig up this time?

Even as the honored films finally began to feel more contemporary, there was a kind of tokenism at work. Pedro Almodóvar's "All About My Mother" won in 1999, more than a decade after he had reinvigorated Spain's film scene and launched a worldwide wave of "queer cinema." Ang Lee's "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" won in 2000, as Hollywood finally noticed that Chinese-language action movies had conquered half the world. (Since then the category has reverted to scenery-and-spinach films, loaded with nutrition: "Nowhere in Africa" in 2002, "The Barbarian Invasions" in 2003 and "The Sea Inside" in 2004.)

It wasn't always this way. Here are six of the first seven foreign-language Oscar winners after the Academy created the category in 1956: Fellini's "La Strada," Fellini's "Nights of Cabiria," Jacques Tati's "Mon Oncle," Marcel Camus' "Black Orpheus," Bergman's "Virgin Spring," Bergman's "Through a Glass Darkly," Fellini's "8 1/2." (The seventh, by the way, was a French film I've never heard of called "Sundays and Cybele.") That's probably about two-thirds of the syllabus in my sophomore-year Intro to World Cinema class right there. It goes on: Buñuel's "Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" won in 1972, Truffaut's "Day for Night" in '73, Fellini's "Amarcord" in '74, Kurosawa's "Dersu Uzala" in '75.

By the early '80s, however, a pattern of rewarding winsome, unmemorable little films instead of ambitious artistic achievement had become well entrenched. In 1977, a now-forgotten French film called "Madame Rosa" won the award, beating out Buñuel's "That Obscure Object of Desire." In 1980, when Truffaut's "The Last Metro" and Kurosawa's "Kagemusha" were both nominated, the winner was a schmaltzy Soviet film called "Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears."

Basically it became clear that the foreign-language Oscar was now about picturesque villages (or urban versions thereof), tables groaning with exotic foodstuffs, and cute little kids. Yeah, Bergman's "Fanny and Alexander" won in 1983, but that was a slam-dunk (and it fulfilled all those requirements). By the end of that decade, we're talking cuteness parade: "Babette's Feast" -- maybe the absolute pinnacle of this paradigm -- followed by "Pelle the Conqueror," followed by "Cinema Paradiso."

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