Brazil and Oscar

by Nathaniel R

In today's big "international feature" news, Denmark has selected EFA frontrunner Another Round for its submission but we already covered Denmark so let's move southwest to a country that also just announced. They've struggled to return to the Oscar lineup since their golden heyday, the late 1990s, when they had three nominees in a four year span. Brazil has selected Babenco: Tell Me When I Die for its Oscar submission this year. It's a documentary about the last years of Hector Babenco's life, directed by his widow Barbara Paz. Oscar voters are already familiar with Babenco, of course, since he made quite an international splash in the 1980s with films like Pixote, Ironweed, and the Oscar-nominated Kiss of the Spider-Woman. It's an interesting choice for a submission though it's not likely to be nominated given Oscar's general resistance to documentaries about film (strange that, since they love narrative features about filmmaking). Still, we're eager to see it.

The Film Experience has always enjoyed a surprisingly robust Brazilian following, so we feel affection. Let's look at films and stats and key submissions.

BRAZIL'S OSCAR STATS

Submitting since 1960 
49 Total Submissions 
4 Nominations (and 1 Additional Finalist)
0 Wins 

<--- Special case: The classic Black Orpheus, a French/Brazilian co-production won the 1959 Oscar. But that was before Brazil was submitting and so it's officially a French winner even though it's set in Brazil and in Portugueuse...

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1981: Marília Pêra in "Pixote"

Please welcome new contributor Nick Taylor who is providing us with extra Supporting Actress pleasure inbetween the Smackdown events.

How close was Hector Babenco’s Pixote to an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film in 1980? Or rather, why was it disqualified? Already lauded in Brazil for its unflinching, documentary-style depiction of the country’s unique epidemic of child criminality and the institutions benefitting from it, the film got axed for doing test screenings outside The Academy’s allotted time frame. That sounds as "necessary" as many of their eligibility nitpicks. Disqualified from consideration for 1980, Pixote became fair game upon its U.S. release in 1981, winning most of the critics prizes for Best Foreign Language Film and scoring a Golden Globe nomination over Oscar’s eventual winner, Hungary's Mephisto.

Pixote also won Best Film from Boston, who took a page from the National Society of Film Critics and gave Marília Pêra their Best Actress award. And while her performance absolutely deserved those prizes...

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