Much as I am loathe to give any further wind to the orgy of self
congratulations and poor taste that was this year's Academy Awards,
given that it has been something of an ongoing discussion on this blog
I do feel obliged to offer a few words to the outcome of the Best
Foreign Language Film contest. That much-maligned category, which has
undergone nearly as many cosmetic makeovers in recent years as the
previous Best Actress winners seen on the Kodak Theatre stage last
night, drew a fair amount of unwanted attention earlier this season
when, despite all the reforms spearheaded by current Foreign Language
nominating committee chair Mark Johnson, Matteo Garrone's widely
acclaimed mafia drama Gomorrah failed to secure a nomination despite being Italy's official submission for the award.
Still, many (including Johnson) argued that the eventual five nominees
were nothing to scoff at, since they managed to include French director
Laurent Cantet's The Class (winner of the Palme d'Or at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival), Austrian director Götz Spielmann's superb revenge drama Revanche (an audience favorite at least year's Telluride and Toronto festivals) and Israeli director Ari Folman's animated documentary Waltz with Bashir, a film that rivaled Gomorrah
in terms of its torrential acclaim from critics and audiences alike
from Cannes up through its commercial release in U.S. cinemas last
December. Given that Folman's film was also in the running for, but
failed to secure, a nomination in the Academy's Best Animated Feature
category, it had generally been considered the favorite to win in the
Foreign Language category. But alas, when the envelope was opened, the
Oscar instead went to Japanese director Yojiro Takita's relentlessly
medicore tearjerker Departures, about an unemployed cellist who
takes a job as an “encoffinment” specialist, preparing dead bodies for
cremation. (As if that weren't enough, Waltz with Bashir was
also omitted from the Oscar telecast's montage of animated features
from 2008, having evidently been deemed a less significant achievement
than Space Chimps and Star Wars: The Clone Wars.)
Admittedly, the win for Departures wasn't a total surprise.
While it may be one of the lesser-known of the nomainetd films (by
virtue of the fact that it played relatively minor film festivals and
has yet to be commercially released in the U.S.), voters in the Foreign
Language category are obliged to see all five nominated films, thereby
placing the contenders on a somewhat level playing field. And when I
found myself at a dinner last week with several knowledgable parties
(including a longtime foreign-language film publicist and the head of a
European country's national film commission), it was generally agreed
that if there was a surprise winner, it was going to be the Japanese
film. Beyond that, there is the simple fact that, along with Germany's The Baader Meinhof Complex, Departures
was easily the most conventional, Hollywood-style movie of the five
Foreign Language nominees — the one with “universal” (read:
one-dimensional) characters, a direly familiar fish-out-of-water
scenario and an incessantly sentimental musical score applied like a
thick shellac.
Meanwhile, I'm sure various conspiracy theories will emerge in the next few days as to exactly how and why Waltz with Bashir got
screwed. Speaking to an audience at last year's New York Film Festival,
Folman himself pointed out that his film, which examines the
controversial role played by Israeli soldiers in the massacre of
Palestinians during the 1982 occupation of Southern Lebanon, had been
criticized by some extreme leftists in Israel for not being
self-critical enough. But I doubt that Academy members objected to the movie on similarly political grounds.
Rather, it seems more likely that Folman's film was simply too
innovative for the Academy's notoriously calcified tastes. Certainly,
by Academy standards, it was one of the more radical works ever to be
nominated in the Foreign Language category — a fragmented memory film
in which truth and illusion collide on a tide of uncertain
recollection. There are multiple narrators, dreams masquerading as
reality (and vice-versa), and so many genres exploded moment by moment
that it becomes imossible to squeeze the film into an easily definable
box. And while Waltz builds to a conclusion that many
(including this critic) counted among the most emotionally devastating
in movies last year, it is a moment that is earned by the film rather
than cheaply calculated, and which raises more questions than it
answers. That's something that many viewers of Folman's film have found
thrilling to behold, but which may well have inspired paroxysms of rage
in Academy voters who stand by the belief that a movie should have a
clear beginning, middle and end and send people out of the theater
feeling better about “humanity.”
Even the somewhat more conventional The Class may have suffered
for similar reasons, since despite the familiar trappings of its
inspirational-schoolteacher scenario, it was that rare such film about
a teacher who tries, but in many cases fails, to make a difference, and
who is as complex and flawed a character as any of his troubled
students. Like Waltz, Cantet's film also liberally mixed
documentary and narrative techniques, using a real teacher and real
students in a fictionalized scenario based on real events — too much,
perhaps, for Academy voters to wrap their heads around (much in the way
that, for decades, documentary films featuring extensive use of
dramatic re-enactments were considered anathema to the Academy's
documentary nominating committee). Or it could simply be that the
Academy felt the nomination was honor enough for films starring
non-professional talent made well outside of their own countries'
“studio systems.” Such films do little to stroke the egos of actors
(the Academy's largest voting branch) who seem to relish sitting in the
Kodak auditorium while being reminded how fabulous they are. It's hard
to imagine a Hollywood remake of Waltz with Bashir or The Class that would have roles in it for many of last night's nominees, but an American Departures starring Sean Penn as the cellist/undertaker and Kate Winslet as his clueless wife…well, that may already be in the works.
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