1980s Best Foreign Language Film: Personal Rankings

by Juan Carlos Ojano

While we’ve got the 1980s fever on this site with Nathaniel listing some of his favorite films and Cláudio sharing his personal Best Actress ballots from the decade, I will chime in with perhaps the category that is one of the closest to me: Best Foreign Language Film (now named International Feature Film). That’s why in 2020, I started my podcast called The One-Inch Barrier where I - together with guests - discussed this category per year...

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"The Room Next Door" and "Emilia Perez" lead the EFA Nominations

by Nathaniel R

Nominations are in the for 37th annual European Film Awards which will take place on December 7th in approximately one month's time. You may recall that last year was dominated by Anatomy of a Fall which took home six awards (Film, Director, Actress, Screenplay, and special awards like Editing and the European University Film Award). It also proved popular with Oscar voters. Here are your nominees for the 2024 prizes. The awards ceremony moves each year. In December it moves to Switzerland for the first time. Oscar hopefuls The Room Next Door (hitting US theaters in December) and Emilia Perez (which hits Netflix next week) lead the nominations with four citations each. International Feature Film Oscar contenders like Denmark’s The Girl with the Needle, Germany’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig, Italy’s Vermiglio, Latvia’s Flow, Norway’s Armand and Senegal’s Dahomey were also popular with voters, scoring multiple nominations. 

Although people don't tend to think of the EFAs as an Oscar precursor, their collective taste does align fairly well with Oscar voters. It's been 9 years, for example since the winning film wasn't also Oscar nominated for either Best Picture and/or Best International Feature Film...

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(Pt 2) Everything you wanted to know about the International Feature race: Stars & Auteurs

by Nathaniel R

Michael Fassbender co-stars in Ireland's KNEECAP

In part one of our breakdown of the Best International Feature Film Oscar race, we looked at recurring themes, LGBTQ appeal, and running time. But there is still a lot to discuss in the collection of 85 films competing first for 15 "finalist" spots (December 17th) and then for the coveted nomination (January 17th, 2025). Let's look at the famous actors and directors who are back again hoping for some gold dust on their films...

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(Pt 1) Everything you wanted to know about the International Feature Film race... but were afraid to ask

by Nathaniel R

BEAUTIFUL EVENING, BEAUTIFUL DAY - Croatia's gay entry

Though 89 films were originally announced as submitting to the Best International Feature Film Academy Award competition this year, only 85 became official contenders. We’ve done a deep dive of the list, updated the charts, and crunched some stats and sought out any patterns to bring you this report. We'll start with the LGBTQ+ competitors, genre classifications, chronology of stories, running time stats, and unintentional 'twins' if you will. Hope you enjoy...

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10 Questions about the Oscar race

by Nathaniel R

Every Oscar chart has been updated. Late October is always a strange time in the awards race. It's a time when most of the major players have surfaced (at festivals or screenings) but nobody has yet seen everything and no awards groups (beyond festival juries) have sorted and sifted through the abundance. Which means anything is still possible until the critics groups and awards org begin to narrow the focus of Academy voters in ways that tend to be both interesting and disheartening. They'll boost a couple of unexpected but worthy contenders into the conversation but at the same time their hive mind choices will pour abundant love on too few titles and starve other beauties of sunlight and water.

So as you peruse the charts, answer these ten questions in the comments...

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