Spain's Three Oscar Submission Finalists

by Nathaniel R

Spain has been chasing Oscars in the Best International Feature category since the very first year of the category's existence. They've been quite successful at it, too, with the third highest nomination count of any country (after France and Italy). The Academia de las Artes y las Ciencias Cinematográficas de España reportedly considered 58 Spanish films this year and though we'd heard they weren't choosing their three finalists until October 10th, word is going around that they've made the decision a bit early and it's these three films as the finalist for the submission honor. In early November they'll choose which will be their submission to the Oscars...

Click to read more ...

Horror Costuming: The Skin I Live In

In October, we'll be celebrating the excellence of costume design in horror cinema.

by Cláudio Alves

Pedro Almodóvar's 19th feature harkens back to a time two decades earlier when the Spanish director was one of European cinema's most shameless provocateurs, an enfant terrible willing to rub the face of polite society in utter tastelessness, jolly amorality, and lustful perversity. Adapted from a novel by Thierry Jonquet, The Skin I Live In is a sordid tale that mixes melodrama with horror, handsome mad scientists and beautiful Frankenstein monsters. More than anything, as its title suggests, this is a film about skin and the places people inhabit…

Click to read more ...

Beauty Break: Maribel Verdú, Goya Darling and Birthday Girl

This post has been updated from its original form, years ago...

Those Goyas must be heavy!

Happy 50th birthday, today, to Spanish beauty Maribel Verdú of Y Tu Mama Tambien and Pan's Labyrinth fame. How many women can claim to have terrorized Snow White and been tag teamed by Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna, and knifed a dictator's officer right in the face? How many women have been nominated for a Goya eleven times and won twice*. Just Maribel, that's who... 

Click to read more ...

Round 7 for Penelope & Pedro with "Parallel Mothers"

by Nathaniel R

Given the elegaic tone of Pedro Almodóvar's brilliant autobiographical Pain & Glory (2019) we worried that it might be his last film. We're so pleased to be feeling paranoid about that now. The 70 year-old master is already writing again or perhaps has finished writing something new. And not just one new project, but three! His next feature (which will shoot in early 2021) is a melodrama called Parallel Mothers, which will star his muse Penélope Cruz. The film will follow the lives of two mothers who give birth on the same day but whose lives take different courses (no word yet on who will play the other mother or if this is a dual role for Cruz). This will be the director and actress's seventh collaboration...

Click to read more ...

Spain's big mistake

by Cláudio Alves

Throughout the recent awards season, I wrote several pieces about the Best International Feature race, an Oscar category that's very dear to my heart. It's also a source of endless frustration for I am Portuguese and Portugal remains the country that holds the record for most submissions without getting a single Oscar nomination. To be fair, that's not always the Academy's fault. Sometimes, the choice submission is so mind-bogglingly misguided, it kills any hope of a nomination the minute it's announced. It's not always that the submitted films are lacking in quality, but, sometimes they're productions that were little seen outside of Portugal and received no buzz whatsoever.

This is by no means a strictly Portuguese problem, mind you. In fact, since we're celebrating the 2002 movie year, it seems like a good time to explore one of Spain's most misjudged bits of Oscar selection…

Click to read more ...