The Problem(s) with the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film

The Oscars are not, and never have been, any kind of indicator of genuine quality. Well, they are, but not to the extent that they would have the rest of the world believe. It is probably true that if a film is nominated for eleven Oscars, it will be a film worth seeing, but the lack of an Oscar nomination or win does not indicate anything about the film other than the fact that it didn’t win any Oscars. In fact, a majority of the best films ever made either didn’t win the big prizes or didn’t win any prizes whatsoever.

It speaks volumes that the #1 film on the IMDb top 250, The Shawshank Redemption, didn’t win a single Oscar and the list (which is most definitely not above reproach itself) is filled to the brim with films that either lost best picture to a film of lesser or comparable quality, or were simply ignored altogether. Examples include Pulp Fiction, The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, The Dark Knight, all of the Star Wars films, 12 Angry Men, Seven Samurai, The Matrix, City of God, Se7en, Fight Club, Spirited Away, Pan’s Labyrinth, The Lives of Others, Downfall, Amelie, It’s a Wonderful Life, Das Boot… really, I could go on forever. As was pointed out by, I think, Steven Spielberg at a recent Academy Awards ceremony, the list of films not to win the big award is arguably more illustrious than the list of winners.

This is to be expected, though. There are hundreds of films released every year and the Academy cannot be expected to get it right every time, just so long as their choice isn’t overly egregious (such as a Shakespeare in Love or Crash) I think we can afford to cut them some slack. The real problem, though, is the incredibly narrow scope of the films that they choose. All of them, aside from the silent ones, have been, on the whole, English language. Precious few have had leads who were anything other than Caucasian and even fewer have come from anywhere other than either the UK or the USA.

Now, what you might have noticed from the above list of great films is the number of them that were not in the English language. Films not in the English language have made up a substantial portion of the greatest films of all time. Think La Dolce Vita, think Bicycle Thieves, The Four-Hundred Blows, and Seven Samurai. It is not a stretch to say that foreign films have been some of the best ever, and foreign film-makers have made some of the best, if not the best, films ever made. Yet, they are noticeably absent from the nominations for best picture come awards season.

In fact, there have only been, in the 80-odd year history of the Academy Awards, eleven non-English language films that have been nominated for best picture. First was The Grand Illusion in 1938, then Z in 1969, followed by The Emigrants, Cries and Whispers, Il Postino, Life is Beautiful, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Letters From Iwo Jima, and, at the last ceremony, Amour. It almost goes without saying that none of these films won the big prize, and none of them were in serious contention either.

It says something fairly damning about the Academy and it’s narrow minded approach to rewarding the best films that, of the hundreds of foreign language films that should have been in contention for the prize of “Best Film of the Year,” only eleven foreign language films have even been nominated. Again, none have won. It’s almost as if, when assessing which films are deserving of recognition, they limit their consideration to British, American, Australian or Canadian productions. Sure, they often dole out the minor technical awards to foreign films, but, in terms of the big prizes, if the actors aren’t speaking English, they don’t want to know.

The problem in the scope of their vision is best exemplified by the nomination of Letters From Iwo Jima, which was directed by Clint Eastwood. It came out in the same year and was in nominated in the same year as two of the greatest films of the last decade (and, indeed, ever) The Lives of Others and Pan’s Labyrinth. I, for one, think Iwo Jima is one of the best war films ever made and possibly Clint Eastwood’s best film, but it is in no tangible way better than either The Lives of Others or Pan’s Labyrinth, both of which sit comfortably in the IMDb top 250 (at #85 and #116 respectively). No, the only real reason for Iwo Jima being so honoured when neither of the other two were was that it was directed by someone the Academy knew and liked. More importantly, though, it was directed by an American, so the Academy could just about stretch their imaginations wide enough to allow it in.

In order to try and recognise foreign language films, the Academy introduced the Best Foreign Language Picture Oscar in 1956 after years of honorary awards being handed out to films as venerated as Bicycle Thieves and Rashomon, and other great foreign language films being nominated in other categories. Now, given their prior reluctance to recognise world cinema, this step can only be regarded as positive, but it does raise a serious problem in the classification of these awards: the entire category, by virtue of the “foreign language” caveat, can be seen as less prestigious than the main prize, which has no such limitations.

It’s almost segregationist, this setting aside as separate all films not in English. The message it sends is that these films aren’t as good as proper, English language films, so we need to put them away in the corner reserved for weird foreigners. It’s patronising and it minimises their brilliance to tuck them away like that and prevent them from competing with the rest on the same footing. The fact is that some of these films wipe the floor with anything produced in English speaking jurisdictions and to deny them the recognition they deserve by setting them aside is little more than an insult. It’s better than ignoring them altogether, but it simply strikes me as a poor remedy to the problem of the previous mentioned narrow mind-set of the Academy voters.

There are further and, arguably more egregious problems, with the practical application of the award. You see, some bright spark had the brilliant idea that each country would be limited to one submission for consideration in the category. So, instead of the voters simply watching the films, then voting for the ones they liked the best, they instead left it up to the country’s to choose for themselves.

This creates the very obvious problem that, when several films potentially worthy of the win are produced by the same country in the same year, only one can be submitted. The most obvious example of this was in 2008, when France produced three films that deserved a place on the list of nominees. Firstly there was The Diving bell and the Butterfly, the beautifully moving, brilliantly shot biopic of Jean-Dominique Bauby, the French Vogue editor left trapped inside his own body after a stroke. The film was nominated for four Oscars, including Best Director for Julian Schnabel. The next was the stirring biopic of Edith Piaf, La Vie en Rose, which netted Marion Cotillard Best Actress (a rarity for a foreign language performance). The last of the films, and the one chosen, was Persepolis, a critically acclaimed animation about life in Iran at the time of the 1979 revolution.

As it was, Persepolis was passed over for the nomination and France had no nominees that year, despite putting out arguably the strongest batch of films. There are other examples, including the recent choice of Rust and Bone and The Intouchables. Both, again, were French, and neither, again, received the nomination, despite being stronger than most of the other nominees, although not, as it happened, the eventual winner, Amour. The same thing happened to Talk to Her, which won for best screenplay, and numerous other films which might not have won, but should have been given the chance. Another prominent example, perhaps amongst the most glaring of omissions, is Das Boot, which was nominated for six other awards, but not best foreign language films. I don’t know why it wasn’t submitted, but it just wasn’t. I have no problem with the idea of submissions, as they bring specific attention to films that might otherwise be passed over, but to, one, insist upon submission and, two, limit a film-making powerhouse like France to the same numbers afforded to a minor film-making nation like Azerbaijan (no offence to Azerbaijanis) is simply ridiculous.

The second problem this throws up is that the selection process is not always based on the artistic merits of the film, but is rather open to influence by political considerations. The most obvious example of this is the famously snubbed-for-no-good-reason Japanese epic from master-director Akira Kurosawa, Ran. Kurosawa, the by the time of the film’s 1985 release, was in his 70s, had terrible eyesight (the film was only completed using his storyboard paintings, done years previously) and his wife had died during production of the film, so he understandably skipped the premiere. This pissed off the Japanese film industry (it was by far the most expensive Japanese production at the time), so they chose not to submit the film, which would have been a shoe-in. It was only a campaign organised by Sidney Lumet that got Kurosawa a director nomination (the only of his long a brilliant career, another indictment of the Academy’s treatment of foreign films).

The next problem with the way the system has been implemented is the person, or lack thereof, to whom the award is given. Technically speaking the award for Best Foreign Language film is given to the country of origin. The director only collects it on the behalf of that country. So, Federico Fellini never won an Oscar, despite his films winning the award four times, and neither have any number of great directors whose films have won the award (such as Francois Truffaut, Ingmar Bergman, the previously mentioned Akira Kurosawa, Vittorio de Sica, Florian Henkel von Donnersmarck, and Michael Haneke.)

This seems incredibly unfair to me. At the very least it should got to the producers, like the Best Picture Oscar. As it is, however, I feel that it should go to the director, like the Oscar for Best Animated Film (about which a whole other article could be written). Even if it went to the producer, it would fit with the general ethos of the awards that plaudits should go to people and not larger bodies. This is why the award for best picture stopped going to the studio and instead started being given to the people responsible for the work.

If there’s one thing to be taken away from this essay, it’s that the Academy need to stop seeing foreign language films as secondary to English language films. As it is, they’re treated like a footnote, an extra tacked on to bestow some cursory congratulation for the best in world cinema. The same could be said of animation (as I hinted earlier), which is similarly condescended to with the Best Animated Feature award despite numerous winners of that prize (like Spirited Away, Up and Wall-E) being, quite simply, the best theatrical release of their respective years. In short, these categories are symptomatic of the general arrogance and narrow-mindedness of the Academy, and, were they not the only currently viable way of recognising such works, I would suggest that they should be done away with.

What do you think? Leave a comment.