Penelope Cruz, Yohana Cobo in Volver
Barbra Streisand – YENTL, THE PRINCE OF TIDES: Biggest Oscar Snubs #5
I've always had a personal grudge against the Academy's rules & regulations for the Best Foreign Language Film category. I know I'm not the only one.
Time and again, deserving films aren't nominated not because Academy voters have different tastes than yours truly, but because they don't even have the chance to watch the potential contenders. Voters in this special category, for instance, are not allowed to watch movies on DVD or video; they actually have to go to official Academy screenings, where their presence is duly tabulated.
Compounding matters, films fall by the wayside because they don't meet some arcane criterion or other. In December 1994, Richard Corliss wrote in Time, "[Krzysztof Kieslowski's] Red was shot in Geneva, with a mostly Swiss cast, yet when the Swiss submitted the film for a foreign-language Oscar, the word came down that Red was ineligible — guilty, apparently, of insufficient Swissness. The decision was stupid. Someone should tell the Motion Picture Academy that films are made by individuals, not by nations."
Admittedly, there have been several rule changes in recent years that have made the process fairer (see 2008/2009 rules here), e.g., Canada was allowed to submit Canadian-based filmmaker Deepa Mehta's 2006 drama Water despite the fact that the film is set in India and its dialogue is mostly in Hindi. [Note: In late 2005, Saverio Costanzo's Private had been rejected by the Academy as an Italian entry because the film's dialogue wasn't in Italian. Set in the Middle East, Private's character spoke Arabic, Hebrew, and English. The previous year, Michael Haneke's Hidden had been disqualified as well because it was an Austrian entry with French dialogue.]
Even so, the system intrinsically remains both unfair and unworkable — in addition to being unrepresentative of the Academy's multicultural and multinational membership. After all, the preliminary voting is all done in Los Angeles (or Beverly Hills, to be exact). Obviously, only those with plenty of free time in their hands — usually retired motion picture personnel — have the chance to watch a couple of dozen movies (out of about 60 or so yearly submissions) during a period of a few weeks. Worse yet, the submitted entries themselves don't necessarily reflect what's best in international cinema as each country can submit only a single film.
Needless to say, the list of "snubs" in the Best Foreign Language Film category is enormous. Here are a few examples: Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal, Luis Buñuel's Nazarin, Carl Theodor Dreyer's Gertrud, Werner Herzog's The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser, Carlos Diegues' Bye Bye Brazil, Emir Kusturica's Time of the Gypsies, Krzysztof Kieslowski's The Double Life of Veronique, Akira Kurosawa's Rhapsody in August.
For this "Biggest Oscar Snubs" series, I've decided to stick to a handful of glaring recent omissions chiefly because the outcry that followed was so vociferous that a couple of them led to direct changes in the Academy rules for that category.
Note: The "Biggest Oscar Snubs" series isn't a reflection of my personal tastes. Instead, the "snubs" are listed according to the furor they generated at the time. Sometimes I agree with those who called the Academy nuts; other times I'm in full agreement with those Academy members who cast their vote for somebody else.
Photo: Volver (Emilio Pereda & Paola Ardizzoni / El Deseo / Sony Pictures Classics)