South Korean Film Awards & the Oscar Race

by Nathaniel R

THE UGLY... one of 19 films competing to become the Oscar submission

Since we've just starting hearing about Oscar submission decisions from the 100+ countries that Oscar invites to participate each year, let's talk about a country that wisely invested in their own arts, with both deregulation and regulation tactics (reducing government censorship whilst protecting home-grown cinema from Hollywood dominance via screen quotas) for the past couple of decades. The results have been impressive and South Korean entertainment is big in multiple countries now, including the US. While their cinema has been popular and lauded for some time, the American Oscars haven’t quite come around, with the sole exception of Bong Joon-Ho's Parasite (2019). It helped that Parasite had a) absolutely exquisite timing of festivals-to-theater-to-awards pipeline and b) was easy to spot as an instant classic / masterpiece. The former is hard (though not impossible) to manage and the latter is exceedingly rare! 

We suspect that Oscar’s resistance to South Korean cinema has to do with the Academy's general genre-aversion...

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Turkey, Czech Republic, and Germany kick off the Best International Feature Film race

by Nathaniel R

We wondered which country would be the early bird this year and that distinction goes to Turkey. Since the submissions are due by October 1, the process in many countries is already well under way and the announcements typically come fast and furious from mid-August through September.

TURKEY 
Turkey has selected last year's Venice Horizons Jury prize winner One of Those Days When Hemme Dies to represent them at the Oscars. The film is the directorial debut of Murat Firatoglu who wrote, produced and stars in the film as a laborer on a tomato farm who decides to kill his boss (the titular character, Hemme) due to unpaid wages...

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New Oscar Charts: Can Norway finally win "Best International Feature Film"?

by Nathaniel R

possible submissions from Japan & Norway

Counterintuitively, we begin this year's April Foolish Predictions (two months late --- woot!) with a category for which we currently have no proof of eligibility for. No country that competes in Oscar's annual Best International Feature Film category has (yet) announced their submission. But we do know, from past experiences, that many of the submissions each year will have premiered at film festivals ranging from last fall in 2024 through the fall of 2025. So we looked at recent editions of Sundance, Berlinale, and Cannes for clues. This is great fun to do as anything is possible this early; you don't even need a US distributor to compete (though of course it doesn't hurt)...

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Oscar Volleys: Best International Film aka “Emilia Pérez” vs. the World

The Oscar Volleys are back for some post-nomination talks. Today, Eric Blume and Nathaniel Rogers discuss Best International Film...

EMILIA PÉREZ | © Netflix

ERIC:  Nathaniel, what fun to have you all to myself to discuss the nominees for Best International Film (which I sometimes still call Best Foreign Film, because that's been in my brain too long).  I think we have five pretty terrific nominees this year.  Before we get into their Oscar-ability, what is your personal take across the five films?  I wouldn't be mad at a ranking!

NATHANIEL:  I share the same nomenclature waffling but we both were Oscar watching since the 1980s so who can blame us?...

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Split Decision: “Emilia Pérez”

In the Split Decision series, two (or three) of our writers face off on an Oscar-nominated movie one loves and the other doesn't. Today, Nick Taylor, Lynn Lee, and Juan Carlos Ojano discuss Emilia Pérez...

NICK TAYLOR: Hello, Lynn and Juan Carlos! I’m really excited to start our conversation on Emilia Pérez, surely the most divisive of this year’s Oscar contenders. I am entering this talk as our resident hater - I admire the nutty swings this movie is taking, though very little of that admiration extends to how those nutty swings are executed by Jacques Audiard and his collaborators. Still, I wanna hear what makes the movie work for you guys, or at least makes these experiments worthwhile. Lynn, as the person in this conversation who likes Emilia Pérez the most, do you wanna take the baton?

LYNN LEE: Haha, is it even safe to admit you like Emilia Pérez these days?...

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