To predict this year’s nominees for the best-international-feature Oscar, you should probably start with the tried and true. When Iran selects a movie directed by Asghar Farhadi, things tend to turn out well—the Oscar nominee has helmed two winners in this category, 2011’s A Separation and 2016’s The Salesman—and it’s done so again with the Amazon Studios–backed A Hero. Italy, meanwhile, is returning to Paolo Sorrentino—the man behind 2014 winner The Great Beauty— whose latest, The Hand of God, is being released by Netflix.
Monday marked the deadline for countries to submit their selections for the best-international-film Oscar, meaning we now have our complete slate of contenders. While those aforementioned two are obvious heavyweights, this year’s race features a dense field packed with titles that have already proven themselves as crowd-pleasers, boast star wattage sure to generate attention, and come from respected directors due for an embrace from the Academy.
Let’s start with that first group, probably fronted by Norway’s The Worst Person in the World. The culmination of director Joachim Trier’s Oslo trilogy, the film debuted at Cannes to rave reviews and won breakout star Renate Reinsve the best-actress prize. Distributor Neon has brought the film to many stops on the fall-festival circuit where it’s played very well, and it’s likely to pop up on several critics’ best-of lists at the end of the year. While the international-film voting process is its own beast, the movie is expected to be at least somewhat competitive in a range of other categories, particularly original screenplay, which never hurts.
Another festival hit from Neon, Denmark’s Flee, may be even better-positioned based on a new trend emerging in the Academy—the rise of the foreign-language documentary contender. For the last two years, a film has been nominated for both best doc and international film, in North Macedonia’s Honeyland and Romania’s Collective—a feat that’d never before been accomplished. Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s Flee does them one better by going animated too, touching audiences—from a virtual Sundance to in-person Telluride and New York bows—with its innovative telling of the story of a gay Afghan refugee. (It’s worth noting that the last several winners of best international film—Roma, Parasite, and Another Round—were nominated in other major categories as well.)
Flee won Sundance’s jury prize for world-cinema documentary, and it’s one of several contenders already bringing hardware to this competitive Oscar race. France surprised by going with this year’s Palme d’Or winner, Julia Ducournau’s very wild Titane, over the more issue-driven Happening, which won the Golden Lion in Venice. Farhadi’s A Hero shared the Cannes Grand Prix with Juho Kuosmanen’s Compartment No. 6, which Finland has submitted. And Ryusuke Hamaguchi won best screenplay on the Croisette for what became Japan’s official selection, Drive My Car, a three-hour epic that may figure into the Oscars’ otherwise thin adapted-screenplay race. (It’s based on a Haruki Murakami short story.)
Colombia’s Memoria also won a special jury prize at Cannes, and boasts extra appeal for voters with a lead turn from Tilda Swinton, playing an expatriate facing a kind of haunting while visiting her sister in Bogotá. (The film will get some attention, too, for its unusual, endless theatrical rollout.) Another movie starring a high-profile actor, Germany’s I’m Your Man, finds Dan Stevens playing a hot robot, with direction by the rising Maria Schrader, a recent Emmy winner for Netflix’s buzzy limited series Unorthodox. And while many believe Spain doomed itself after passing over past category winner Pedro Almodóvar and his acclaimed latest, Parallel Mothers, the country will instead be represented by another starry vehicle, The Good Boss, a comedy propelled by a meaty Javier Bardem turn.
As for others to watch out for: The Czech Republic’s Zátopek, a biopic of the famed Olympic long-distance runner, has the kind of sweep that may play well to the international branch, and on the less accessible front, Iceland competes with the horrifically fun Lamb, a modest U.S. box office success that’s also A24’s first international-film contender.
As always, the best-international-film race will be determined from a short list. This year it’s been expanded from 10 to 15 films—a decision likely made to avoid the high-profile misses of years past, such as France’s Elle (which scored Isabelle Huppert a best-actress nomination). But the Academy has also removed what’s been known as the “save,” the loophole in which the International Executive Committee could add three deserving titles to the short list after intense debate, even if they fell short of the votes. (Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty is rumored to have benefited from this before going on to win the Oscar.) Whether this all means we’ll have more or fewer eye-popping snubs—or, in a year as competitive as this, whether we can say which films are more or less likely to begin with—remains to be seen.
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