Everything You Wanted To Know About the Foreign Film Race*... (*but were afraid to ask Pt.1)

Tonight The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences released the official list of Best Foreign Language Film Submissions that have qualified for the big show. There are 83 competitors this year, breaking the record by 7 films and in January 11% of those (aka 9 films... I think it really should be 12 each year) will move on to the "finals" from which 5 nominees will be chosen. In a long overdue adjustment to the category the names of the winning film's director will be placed on the statue alongside the country. Previously it was just the country which is silly because nobody would claim that Pedro Almodovar, Ingmar Bergman or Federico Fellini didn't win this category, you know?

The Film Experience's Official Submission Charts, the most comprehensive collection of the nominees on the web, are fully updated with posters, official charts, running times and more.

Pt. 1 Afghanistan through Ethiopia - 25 submissions
Pt. 2 Finland through Nepal -30 submissions
Pt. 3 Peru through Venezuela -28 submissions

READY TO DIG A LITTLE FURTHER? Let's break those 83 films down further and see what we're really looking at this year. Which countries are submitting for the first time? Which popular countries are STILL waiting for their first win? Are there familiar stars in the mix? Read on to find out... 

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138 days til Oscar: That's your Best Picture length!

138 is a magic number. It's the average length, in minutes, of a Best Picture winner. Here are the running times of all winnners from longest to shortest. You'll see that the majority of winners are over 2 hours long which has caused no end of padding in "serious" movies but alas, not enough padding for tender buttocks watching the interminable movies. 

Here are your Best Picture winners from longest film to the shortest.

1. Gone With the Wind (1939) 238 minutes
   Just two minutes shy of four hours, but worth every second. Lots of Gone With the Wind discussion here. Did you see its recent two day theatrical screening?
2. Lawrence of Arabia (1962) 216 minutes
3. Ben-Hur (1959) 212 minutes
   Currently in the process of being remade because that's how Hollywood do. Although this film was itself a remake so... we'll let it pass. Still there is no way its signature scene, the chariot race, will be as thrilling with CGI.
   ˆˆˆ over 3½ hours ˆˆˆ
4. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) 201 minutes
5. The Godfather Part 2 (1974) 200 minutes
6. Schindler's List (1993) 195 minutes
7. Titanic (1997) 194 minutes
8. Gandhi (1982) 191 minutes
9. The Deer Hunter (1979) 182 minutes
10. Dances With Wolves (1990) 181 minutes
    ˆˆˆ over 3 hours ˆˆˆ
    
    other long ass movies and how it relates to this year after the jump...
    
    

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170 Days until Oscars: Brody & Dreyfuss

170 is the amount of days by which Adrien Brody (The Pianist) narrowly defeated Richard Dreyfuss (The Goodbye Girl) to become the Youngest Best Actor winner ever. Do you think both of them deserved their wins?

Adrien Brody (29) and Richard Dreyfus (30) are the 2 youngest Lead Actor winners

1977 Best Actor	2002 Best Actor
Woody Allen, Annie Hall	Adrien Brody, The Pianist
Richard Burton, Equus	Nicolas Cage, Adaptation
Richard Dreyfus, The Goodbye Girl	Michael Caine, The Quiet American
Marcelo Mastroianni, A Special Day	Daniel Day Lewis, Gangs of New York
John Travolta, Saturday Night Fever	Jack Nicholson, About Schmidt

The most hilarious thing about this statistic is that Adrien Brody is both the youngest Best Actor winner at 29 AND the only twentysomething winner. Meanwhile "29" is actually the most common age to win Best Actress. These eight women all accomplished it and none of them were anywhere close to making a "youngest" list. 

Ginger Rogers, Kitty Foyle (1940)
Ingrid Bergman, Gaslight (1944) 
Judy Holliday, Born Yesterday (1950)
Elizabeth Taylor, BUtterfield 8 (1960)
Julie Andrew, Mary Poppins (1964)
Jodie Foster, Silence of the Lambs (1991) 
Reese Witherspoon, Walk the Line (2005)
Natalie Portman, Black Swan (2010) 

A record book ode to double standards! This can't possibly bode well for Jack O'Connell (Unbroken) who just turned 24 last month... but what an impressive season he's likely to have anyway with two acclaimed leading man performances already jostling about for attention (Starred Up, '71) and one more as Christmas present (Unbroken).

current best actor chart  (i'll update all the charts once I'm back from Toronto on the 14th)

'Common Threads', and Oscar's History with LGBT Documentaries

Today is Wear It Purple Day, which asks people to simply wear the color purple in support of LGBT equality. It's appropriate then that we continue our celebration of 1989 today with a look at that year's Oscar winner for Best Documentary. Glenn is joined in a conversation by friend of The Film Experience and doco-expert Daniel Walber, writer for Nonfics and Film School Rejects.

Glenn: Daniel, thank you for joining us. While I would obviously love to hear your thoughts on the film, I think I would be just as interested to hear about how well you think Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt sits amongst Oscar's documentary history. So few films about gay issues have even been nominated, yet alone won (the only other winner of its kind is The Times of Harvey Milk, also by Rob Epstein), but does Common Threads hold up as a winner? And furthermore, given just one year later they ignored Paris is Burning, does it strike you as just a case of voters simply going for a subject matter that they felt was Important and Worthy rather than any genuine interest in LGBT issues?

Daniel: That's a fascinating question. I'm not sure a movie with the precise scope and loose style of Paris Is Burning would have appealed to the Academy no matter what it was about. They didn't go for Grey Gardens either. Common Threads was definitely helped by the gravity and capital-I Importance of its subject, but I also think it holds up well as a film. Epstein knows what he’s doing, and this one has just as powerful an emotional arc as Harvey Milk. The device of zooming in on panels of the quilt to introduce stories feels a tad schlocky at first, particularly with the Bobby McFerrin music underneath, but it wasn’t long before I was won over by its genuine affection and understanding for its subjects. Perhaps there’s some consternation that it beat For All Mankind [for the Oscar], which I know still has a great reputation (I haven’t seen it), but I do think Common Threads deserved the attention.

How to Survive a Plague, The Celluloid Closet and Film vs TV after the jump.

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182 days 'til Oscar

Which power couple will be obsessing over in just six months time? The 87th Oscars approach and as long as the movies have been around there have been fabulously wealthy and glamorous movie star couples. Take Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks for instance, the original celebrity power couple. If you must know (I know you are too shy to ask) my favorite films of theirs are His: The Thief of Bagdad (1924) and Hers: Stella Maris (1918) though admittedly I have many more left to see.

Fairbanks & Pickford were married in 1920 when both were superstars, he the original Zorro and she Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and other big hits. He famously gave Pickford "The Star of Bombay," a 182-carat sapphire which was not actually from Bombay but from Sri Lanka. She later bequeathed it to the Smithsonian where it remains. There's your priceless (okay, $½ million in today's dollars) piece of trivia for the day. You're welcome.

Pickford (the original "America's Sweetheart") and Fairbanks (the original "King of Hollywood") were among the 36 co-founders of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Fairbanks served as its first President and both would eventually receive Honorary Oscars with Mary also winning a regular statuette for Coquette). Could they have ever imagined how obsessive we'd all be about their little annual banquets 87 years later? 

At the 86th Oscars, contemporary Hollywood's most glamorous megastar couple Angelina Jolie & Brad Pitt famously ate a pizza (well, he did) but they were also honored. She took home an Honorary (albeit non televised. argh) and he won his first competitive Oscar for producing 12 Years a Slave. They could theoretically both take home Oscars again if Fury and Unbroken are massive hits with AMPAS and reasonably well liked by audiences. 

Do you think they will be?

CURRENT OSCAR PREDICTIONS (which category needs a major rethink?)