The Academy managed to release its shortlist of foreign-language films on Wednesday without igniting the kind of controversy we’ve seen in years past, when the likes of “Gomorrah” and “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” were left off.
This time around, the two-part process – in which volunteers from all branches of the Academy viewed the 65 eligible films, and their votes determined six entries on the shortlist; an executive committee then looked at those selections and added three additional films -- left standing frontrunners “Un Prophete” and “The White Ribbon,” and added respected films like “Ajami” and “The Milk of Sorrow.”
Certainly, partisans of the Romanian film “Police, Adjective” could argue that their movie, which has garnered near-unanimous critical acclaim, should have been included. But that film – which details a routine police investigation in excruciating detail, interrupted by two lengthy conversations about semantics – was always a very tough sell with the famously conservative voters.
(For me, the film works well in theory but was difficult to sit through. Is the most boring movie in the world not boring if that boredom is deliberate, and conceptually brilliant?)
What’s left, judging by what I’ve seen from the shortlist (six out of the nine) is a solid cross-section without many quirks, and one in which the dominant films remain the pre-shortlist favorites from Germany and France, Michael Haneke’s “White Ribbon” and Jacques Audiard’s “Prophete.”
The rest of the field includes one of the category’s traditional staples, a World War II drama (“Winter in Wartime”), a near-wordless Asian film (“Kelin”), a coming-of-age story set in the Australian outback (“Samson & Delilah”) and a gritty story of tensions in the Middle East (“Ajami”), among others.
A couple of countries bypassed more acclaimed but tougher films to submit the kind of big, sweeping, old-fashioned epics that once were the category’s stock-in-trade – but it didn’t work, as China’s “Forever Enthralled” and Italy’s “Baaria” weren’t chosen. I don’t know if the film Italy passed over to choose “Baaria,” “Vincere,” would have fared any better, but I’m all but certain that the Chinese film “City of Life and Death” would have gotten a nomination.
And I wonder if the Spanish film board is reconsidering its antipathy to Pedro Almodovar, considering that the film it selected in place of Almodovar’s “Broken Embraces,” “The Dancer and the Thief,” is now out of the running.
The list has nothing too quirky (sorry, Canada’s affecting but kinky “I Killed My Mother”), and little humor; personally, I mourn the omission of the terrific Danish film, “Terribly Happy.”
If there’s a sleeper among the shortlisted films I’ve seen, it might be the Argentinian entry, “El Secreto de Sus Ojos,” which is slick and polished (its director, Juan Jose Campanella, has done numerous episodes of “Law and Order”), but also emotionally affecting.
That film seems clearly to be a selection from the body of voters, along with “Winter in Wartime,” possibly “Kelin” and, I suspect, “The White Ribbon” as well.
The executive committee, for its part, could not afford to leave “White Ribbon” and “Un Prophete” off the shortlist; if forced to guess, I’d say that they didn’t need to add the former, but that they did add the latter, along with “Ajami.”
