International Oscars: Mexico's finalists and more submission titles

by Nathaniel R

THE HOLE IN THE FENCE

Mexico has chosen their Oscar submission finalist list. We'd do a whole huge post on it but we suspect by the time we did they'd have named their winner and despite divisive reviews thus far we suspect they won't be able to resist sending Iñarritu again. As it stands now they're looking at three films we've already reviewed here at TFE: Alejandro G Iñarritu's Bardo (False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths), Lorenz Vigas' very dark father/son drama The Box, and Joaquin del Paso's allegorical summer camp drama The Hole in the Fence. The other two they're looking at are the sexual drama Nudo Mixteco by Angeles Cruz and the thriller Presencias by Luis Mandoki. Among those filmmakers Inarritu (Biutiful, Amores Perros) and Mandoki (Innocent Voices) have represented Mexico before while Vigas's debut film, the gay drama From Afar, was sent to represent Venezuela in its year.

But that's not all. We now know which films Costa Rica, Czech Republic, Turkey,and Uganda  are submitting. Details after the jump...  

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Top Ten: The Countries Oscar Forgot To Honor

by Nathaniel R

Any discussion of Oscar's Best International Feature Film competition throughout history begins with Italy and France. They dominated the early years and though they rarely win now they can still generate buzz with comparative ease (including this year with Hand of God and Titane). Oscar voters have (virtually) travelled to every continent and every major film market at least once or twice since the birth of the category in the 1950s. Their choices don't always reflect where the hot spots in world cinema are, though -- They notoriously missed the entirety of the Romanian New Wave in the Aughts, the provocative if brief Dogme 95 period in Denmark, apart from Japan they're super stingy with Asian cinema in general to the point where it took an international blockbuster ($259 million globably for Parasite) for them to finally notice what was happening in South Korea. Still, it's a fascinating category both for its triumphs and its failures.

All that said it's also worth repeating that no one is ever truly fair to Oscar in their critiques. It's an impossible sisphyean task to sum up the best of what's happening in non English language cinema throughout history via only five titles each season, especially since you can't control which titles will be in the mix and you cant have more than one per country. 

Here are the 10 admirably persistent countries that keep trying despite Oscar's refusal to acknowledge them. They've submitted the most often without receiving a single nomination. Will their fates change this year?

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International Feature: Indonesia, Malawi, Malta, and Slovakia submit

More entries announced!

INDONESIA
Indonesia will send Kamila Andini's Yuni a drama about a teenage girl who rejects a marriage proposal. But the proposals keep coming and culturally she's supposed to accept...

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Seven new Oscar submissions, French finalists, and a potential Israel/Palestine conflict

by Nathaniel R

LET IT BE MORNING

The announcements of Oscar submissions from various countries are rolling in fast now. If you've missed previous posts we've already covered the submissions from Cambodia, Ecuador, Morocco, Poland, Serbia, Switzerland,  Albania, Ireland, Kyrgzstan, Slovenia, Ukraine, Armenia, Canada, Colombia, Peru, Germany, and Spain and have reviewed three of the films. In today's huge update we have finalists lists from Chile, France, and Sweden as well as official submissions from Greece, Hungary, The Netherlands, Somalia, South Korea, and Taiwan. But let's start with Israel as we foresee complications.

ISRAEL
Each year Israel's own Oscar style prize "The Ophir" is held around this time and whichever film wins becomes the automatic submission. They've only run into trouble with this system twice in the past (once for a film that had too much English and the other time with a tie so they had to vote again for Oscar purposes). But this year might be another. Let It Be Morning, with a largely Palestinian cast from source material by a Palestinian author, was the big winner at the Ophirs so it became the Israeli submission. While the director Erin Kolirin (of The Band's Visit fame) is Israeli, the film is about Palestinians and earlier this summer, the cast refused to attend the Cannes premiere because the festival labelled the film as an Israeli film. One imagines they'll object to this film representing Israel at the Oscars, for the same reason. Potentially complicating matters further is that Palestine also submits to the Oscars...

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The Honoraries: Danny Glover as Producer

by Cláudio Alves

Danny Glover's cameo in BAMAKO

Despite his fantastic career as an actor, Danny Glover isn't receiving an Honorary Oscar to recognize that work. Instead, AMPAS is honoring him with the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award as a way of celebrating his lifelong actions as a community activist, fighting for worldwide justice, and other such efforts. If anything, those values are more imminently evident in Glover's filmography as a producer rather than as an actor. Since the early 90s, after becoming a box-office star, the American thespian started leveraging his success to try and make specific projects happen. Charles Burnett's To Sleep with Anger marked Glover's first experience as a producer, and the funding was mainly secured through his participation in Lethal Weapon 2. From then on, Danny Glover has been a strong supporter of underrepresented filmmakers, helping them make their cinematic dreams come true… 

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