The Film Experience™ was created by Nathaniel R. All material herein is written by our team. (This site is not for profit but for an expression of love for cinema & adjacent artforms.)
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Monday, August 11, 2025 at 8:00AM Three more countries are nearing their decisions: Netherlands, Switzerland, and Israel. The first two have won the category before but Israel remains the most-nominated country that's never taken this Oscar. Let's look at the posisble contenders from each after the jump...
Tuesday, August 5, 2025 at 4:30PM 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...
Monday, August 4, 2025 at 9:51AM 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...
Friday, July 11, 2025 at 7:00PM 
Whew. That took longer than expected but you can now see all of the "April Foolish" first-round predictions for this Oscar year, albeit compiled in May & June and delivered to you in early July. Since the first wave of 20 categories takes so long to compile (updates are easier) we should note up front that James Vanderbilt's Nuremberg, another film centered on the Nuremberg Trials, was scheduled for a November 2025 release after the weeks of research for these charts so it is not yet included. That said we can hardly claim it a certainty as a competitor. World War II is no longer automatic "Bait" for voters, Vanderbilt is not (yet) an Oscar player and though the cast has four previously nominated actors none are the sort that Oscar voters ALWAYS watch regardless. Anyway, we'll save it for the next up date.
What follows are a dozen key questions were asking ourselves in July about the upcoming competition before things really heat up during the fall film festivals. We've love to hear your thoughts on these 12 questions...
Thursday, July 10, 2025 at 6:04PM by Nathaniel R
Rose Byrne, Ayo Edebiri, and Renata Reinsve
We're almost done with the first round predictions for the Oscar charts. Today, Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress and the question most prominent on our minds is which women will have "Oscar Nominee" after their names forever more? It's hard to tell this far out but we have some inkling of the possibilities...
