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…
Despite being Spain's most internationally celebrated contemporary filmmaker, Pedro Almodóvar isn't as represented in the list of Spanish Oscar submissions as one might expect. Overall, he's the country's most submitted director ever, having had seven of his films compete. Of that group, one picture won the Academy Award, two others were nominated and another one got a place on the category shortlist. That being said, there were some years when submitting an Almodóvar would have been a safe bet but Spain's submission went another way. I'm thinking, for instance of 1990, when Carlos Saura's Ay, Carmela! was submitted instead of Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, and 2011, when Augusti Villaronga's Black Bread got in instead of The Skin I Live In. Again, that isn't to say those are bad films (I'd say Black Bread is better than the Almodóvar flick), but they appear like lesser choices when the Oscar race is considered.
No other year better exemplifies this phenomenon than the aforementioned 2002. Spain's selection for that Academy Awards ceremony was Fernando León de Aranoa's Mondays in the Sun which premiered at the San Sebastián Film Festival and would only get an American release in the summer of 2003, long after the Oscar voting had ended and little golden men had been already handed out. Unsurprisingly, it didn't get nominated. One might adore Aranoa's film, but it seems disingenuous to argue that it had a better chance at winning Oscar gold than that year's Almodóvar extravagance. After all, 2002's Talk to Her got its creator two unexpected nominations for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay, winning the latter, an honor that's never been matched by another movie produced in Spain.
On one hand, it's easy to understand a committee's reluctance to consider Talk to Her as their country's representative. No matter how critical praised it might be, this is one weird picture whose explorations of desire and longing, bodily autonomy, and male control over women are a complicated web of uncertain morality. On the other hand, Talk to Her is inspired cinema at its best. It speaks to the film's mastery that its twisted narrative is so effective, taking the audience through an odyssey of heady concepts, where the membrane separating love and harm, care and abuse, splendor and scandal, is more porous than ever. Instead of bludgeoning the audience with provocation, this most strangely mature of Almodóvar's flicks dances for the spectators, seducing them, whipping them into a frenzy of artistic ecstasy. Even considering its challenging nature, it's difficult to imagine Talk to Her not getting nominated had it been submitted. It would have probably won, too.
How many times should Spain have submitted Almodóvar? Definitely in 2002.