The world loves the Olympics, but the world is also aware that they have to be policed. Always a problem child, the international feature film category at the Academy Awards (formerly known as best foreign-language film) is fast becoming a juvenile delinquent lobbing grenades of credibility back at the mothership.
Stipulating Olympic-style official submissions by country as opposed to Bafta’s generic ‘not in the English language’, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences (Ampas) is becoming increasingly vulnerable to reputational damage in the faultlines of a global marketplace which is both breaking up and consolidating at the same time.
This category is a bumpy mix of politics, prestige and – since South Korea’s Parasite burst out of the category in 2020, winning three more Oscars including best picture and director – money. Each year it all becomes a little bit more incoherent, a Babel, you might say, of rules and regulations that the globalised industry is outgrowing faster than Ampas can organise committees to address the problem. The individual country nominations for this year are all now in, although Ampas hasn’t yet published the final list. There is not a requirement for exhibition in the US, but the absurdities of the process of national committee nominations in a world of international co-productions has winners and losers long before any shortlist appears.
Hounded out of Iran by a repressive regime, Mohammad Rasoulof is fortunate that Farsi-language The Seed Of The Sacred Fig has been adopted by co-production territory Germany as that country’s official nomination, while German-language filmmakers take a back seat. That hasn’t happened to India’s All We Imagine As Light, despite co-pro territory France putting it in the final shortlist (the country instead selected the French-directed and produced Spanish-language film Emilia Pérez). A list that doesn’t have Payal Kapadia’s name on it is not the best list of 2024, although it’s possible Light will be rescued, just like last year’s Anatomy Of A Fall (not selected by France), and make it into the major categories.
Of course this horse-wrangling isn’t new. Repressive regimes and freedom of speech for filmmakers are incompatible: I’ve written about it here in recent years but first covered it in 1991 when Zhang Yimou was banned from attending the Oscars after his film Ju Dou became the first-ever Chinese film to be nominated in that category (it was co-produced with Japan, a fact which these days might see it nominated from there, if the Japanese committee was willing to risk China’s ire). “The international film community has a special obligation to fight for freedom of expression,” said Steven Spielberg and Kathleen Kennedy in a thundering op-ed in The New York Times at that time, noting how they shot Empire Of The Sun in Shanghai.
Goalposts have moved further since then. China, which has still never won in the category, now only nominates patriotic epics and no longer streams the Oscars live. Russia boycotts the Academy Awards and the number of countries who clearly do not nominate their best films has surged. If Ju Dou was made in 2024, it would simply not go forward.
Putting this down to a handful of bad actors won’t work forever. Many European countries are experiencing a surge to the right at the moment. France’s recent inability to select its best film – a trend which Emilia Pérez buckles – can be read as indecisiveness, but if a far-right government were to assume power, it might all look more sinister. Iran’s case is clearly the most egregious as it insists on locking up filmmakers on the one hand while submitting films with the other. Bahman Ghobadi has urged the Academy to establish a ‘refugee category’ to silence from Ampas – in any case, that boat might be overloaded, such are the times.
Money talks too. It’s no secret that national governments put a significant amount of support and funding into Oscar campaigns. Streamers also have deep pockets for this race. National selection committees can face pressure to opt for the film with the US distributor committed to a big spend. This has resulted in a micro-industry which has grown around the 90-odd films which annually enter the race for the international feature Oscar - and that’s not a bad thing. At a time of great difficulty for independent cinema, any help is to be gratefully taken. But the financial inequities can compound the political ones to make the category seem incoherent at times.
One of the benefits of the streaming boom is that it has opened the doors for subtitled product, resulting in a new generation for whom a ‘foreign’ language is no barrier to the wide consumption of filmed entertainment. It’s no barrier to calling out the difficulties, vagaries and hypocrisies of this section either. As it approaches its centenary, Ampas should, like the Olympics, try once again to get in front of the problem.
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