Index | Picture | Actress | Actor | Supp Actor | Supp Actress | Dir
Screenplays | Visual | Aural | Animation | International Feature
93rd Oscars. Oscar Contenders of 2020 (for the April 2021 Ceremony) - For prediction, discussion, entertainment purposes
AND THE NOMINEES ARE...
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BOSNIA & HERZEGOVINA
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DENMARK Denmark is currently Oscar's favourite country with 6 nominaions and 1 win in the past 11 years alone. |
HONG KONG Better Days |
ROMANIA |
TUNISIA The Man Who Sold His Skin |
| Who should win? READERS CHOICE | ||||
ANOTHER ROUND triumphed with 45% of your votes |
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| Who was left out? | ||||
| The other finalists were Globe nominees like Guatemal's La Llorona reviewand France's Two of Us review, plus Mexico's I'm No Longer Here review, Iran's Sun Children review, Russia's Dear Comrades!, Chile's The Mole Agent (which did snag a somewhat surprising nomination in Best Documentary Feature), Taiwan's A Sun, Czech Republic's Charlatan reviewNorway's Hope review and Ivory Coast's Night of Kings | ||||
| Who will win? | ||||
| We think this is a race between Bosnia and Denmark. | ||||
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NOTE: 93 submissions this year. Here's our earlier coverage
Charts with all 93 submissions...
To qualify for submission in this category a film must have opened in its home country between October 1st, 2019 and December 31st, 2020 --the release/submission window is 15 months this year due to the coronavirus disruption. Each country can only select one film and each country has a different process for selecting that film. That part is up to the country themselves. NUMBER OF CONTENDERS IN THE PAST DECADE
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| OSCAR STATS & FUN TRIVIA ABOUT THIS PARTICULAR CATEGORY | ||||
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Most wins for a foreign film
THREE WAY TIE Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (Taiwan 2000) and Fanny & Alexander's (Sweden 1983) previously shared the record with 4 wins and mostly in the same categories: Foreign Film plus craft categories. This past season, Parasite (South Korea, 2019) tied them but in different categories: Picture, Director, Screenplay, and International Film
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Most nominations for a foreign film Roma went on to three wins and Crouching four but neither film took Best Picture. |
Most competitive wins in the category by director |
Most competitive wins & nominations w/out winning this category Pan's Labyrinth (2006) won 3 awards from 6 nominations but lost its own category to The Lives of Others. |
Most nominated country France leads with 38 nominees (they were also given 3 honoraries before nominations began proper in 1956). Their most recent win was a long time ago, though: Indochine (1992) starring Catherine Deneuve. MORE ON FRANCE & OSCAR HERE |
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Most winning country Italy leads with 14 wins (3 of which were honoraries). Some of the most famous films among their winners are The Bicycle Thief (1949), 8 1/2 (1963), The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1971), Cinema Paradiso (1989), and Life is Beautiful (1998)
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Most popular country with Oscar at this very moment That would be Denmark which was nominated 50% of the time in in the 2010s (most recently Land of Mine) winning once (A Better World). In addition to their 5 nominees in the 2010s, they had 2 finalists. Runner up right now? Poland with 4 noms and a win this past decade |
First foreign language film nominated for Best Picture Grand Illusion (1938). But Oscar didn't start giving statues to foreign films until 11 years later and foreign films didn't get their own competitive category until 1956 |
Most influential snub of the past two decades You have the horror of the snubbing of Romania's Palme d'or winner 4 Weeks, 3 Months and 2 Days (2007) to thank for the creation of the Academy's Executive Committee. Nominations have been so much better ever since! |
First foreign language film to win an acting Oscar Italy's Two Women (1961) won Best Actress for Sophia Loren who was, not unimportantly, already a major star in the US. But Italy did not submit her vehicle for Foreign Film, choosing Michelangelo Antonioni's La Notte instead (which was not nominatd) |
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First country to break through Oscar's midcentury France/Italy/Japan obsession For the first 12 years of foreign-language film honors only France, Italy, or Japan were ever honored. Sweden was the first country to break up that strangehold with back to back Ingmar Bergman wins for The Virgin Spring (1960) and Through a Glass Darkly (1961) |
First foreign language film to win any Oscar Switzerland's Marie-Louise (1944) won Best Screenplay, years before the foreign film category began. |
First foreign language film winner to win more than one Oscar Japan's Gate of Hell (1954) won the Honorary for Foreign Film and also took home Costume Design. Costume Design is the category with the most wins for foreign-language films (7 in total)... Runner up is Original Screenplay (6 wins including Parasite last year). And there's a two way tie for third place: Cinematography, and Score (with 5 wins in each) |
Only directors of foreign film nominees to go on to direct a Best Picture winner Czech director Milos Forman for Loves of a Blonde (1965)/ Fireman's Ball (1967) + One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)/ Amadeus (1984) was the first to do it. Two Mexican filmmakers have followed suit: Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu for Amores Perros (2000)/Biutiful (2010) + Birdman (2014) and Guillermo del Toro for Pan's Labyrinth (2006) + Shape of Water (2017) Only Bong Joon-ho has done both simultaneously (with Parasite, 2019) |
Only Best International Film winners to also win Best Director Bong Joon-ho (Parasite for South Korea) and Alfonso Cuarón (Roma for Mexico) are the only directors to accomplish this feat and both were very recent. It's worth noting that Ang Lee (Taiwan) has won the Best Director category twice but curiously neither time was that win connected to either a Best Picture Winner or a Best International Film winner. |