Roma or cold war for the best Oscar in foreign language? Ranking of nominees

This year, the Oscar race in foreign languages ​​has no precedent. For the first time, all those who participated in the first phase in Los Angeles were also invited to be shortlisted of nine nominees to five. This has greatly increased the number of voters, just as international members have been allowed to circulate the short list.

Over the past three years, the Academy has facilitated participation in the foreign language Oscar nomination committee for Phase 1, which has had a significant impact on the total number of nominations. Foreign language films appear in the Best Film, Director and Theater, as well as in the design, cinematography, hair and make-up events.

Director Hirokazu Kore-eda

The new chairs of the foreign affairs committee, screenwriter Larry Karaszewski and documentary filmmaker Diane Weyermann, have called for inclusion. "Joining the other members of the Academy has worked," said Karaszewski, "with the profile of several of these films at a level that has not been seen in the foreign language category for a while. "

All voters of the Academy can view the latest five movies online. The links were sent to the electors on Nomination Day, January 22, two weeks before the DVD scribes receive their mail.

But how many will all five see? Some may vote for the most popular and best-viewed films (see: "Roma") compared to more obscure titles, but all have fans. Some may think that "the Roma" deserve the first foreign language win for Mexico, while others may think that the glorious romance of the "Cold War" era, which also rivals "Roma" for the director and cinematography, should win something.

More information on the nominees, ranked in order of probability of winning:

"Cold War", directed by Pawel Pawlikowski

Country: Poland, with 11 nominations and one win, for Pawlikowski's black and white film on the holocaust, "Ida".

Price: Cannes: Best Director, National Critics' Commission: Best Foreign Language Film, New York Film Critics Circle: Best Foreign Language Film, European Film Awards: Film, Director, Actress, Writer, Screenwriter, Editor, ASC : Best cinematography, Oscars: three nominations, including director and cinematography.

Anne Thompson

Distributor: Amazon Studios

Domestic Box Office: $ 2,883,000

Metascore: 90.

Amazon

Written by Pawlikowski and Janusz Glowacki, this melancholy novel follows the Polish musician and pianist Stalin (Tomasz Kot) and the enthusiastic dancer and singer Zula (singer-actress Joanna Kulig), touring with their troupe of folk dances. The lovers – inspired by Pawlikowski's parents, who have played their stormy relationship for more than 40 years, separate and meet in France, Yugoslavia and Poland as they try to create an authentic self, thwarted by the national policy.

Pawlikowski grew up upset by his parents who were arguing and separating constantly. At the age of 17, his mother first met his eldest father in eastern Poland and fled to Warsaw to study ballet, discouraged by his wealthy parents. His father was handsome. "He was charismatic, he looked like Gregory Peck," said Pawlikowski. "He looked like Tomasz. They fell in love, she was young, it was fantastic.

Her parents had business, broke up, got together, had baby Pawel, and separated again after a few years. His mother remarries and takes 14-year-old Pawlikowski to London, where he studies and directs films for the BBC. His parents are reunited at the end of their lives and die together in 1988.

And Pawlikowski, after some success in Britain with movies such as "My Summer of Love" with Emily Blunt, is married and "was really trying to have an old family" , he said, "which was not so simple, with two children and a dog and all that." After the sudden death of his wife, he raised his children while teaching cinema, without making films for five years.Once at the university, he moved to Paris, where he conducts the experimental "The Woman to the Fifth", with Joanna Kulig.But he felt lost.

He was attracted to his native country, where he directed his first Polish film, "Ida" in black and white, which earned him the Oscar and gave him the necessary confidence to do "The Cold War", another very personal film that showed how politics, borders, and exile can shape and distort self-meaning.

The story of his parents "was more complicated," said Pawlikowski. "It was a starting point for talking about such a relationship. For me, it was like the matrix of all relationships between a man and a woman. "He realized that he was inexplicably attracted by the relationship between married poets, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath (he had been trying to develop a film about them, but had retired). "It's a fantastic fight itself, it's as strong as it is, but they're defending themselves, in which case it's gone, but they were both charismatic, strong, not giving in and sometimes Totally symbiotic and sometimes totally hateful "Why does this story interest me so much?" It brings us back to the odd story of love with my parents. "

In this story, Wiktor and Zula meet around a detuned piano, while the head of the folk music troupe gauge the musical abilities of the charming young woman. The attraction and the connection between them is powerful. "The idea of ​​using three or four patterns and modifying them, transforming them into orchestras and choruses, and then turning them into jazz was in the beginning," said Pawlikowski.

Damned lovers never become very strong, as they are pursued across Europe by a complicated policy. "The soil was still fragile," said Pawlikowski. "Life was particularly fragile under Stalinism in exile."

Pawlikowski defines his film in a highly contrasted black and white past, digitally shot in the old format of the Academy, with many shots, script changes and improvised fluid shots on the fly . "I carve with real flesh," he said. That's how he ended up with a 89-minute film; he does not draw conventional coverage. "I try to have a scene that does not take shape. There is a kind of music and a punchline. I'm trying to build the movie with simple bricks, put them side by side. He edits as he goes.

To make people cry was not his goal. "Of course, you handle," he says. "The story is very moving, but I try not to blatantly press the buttons.

Final result: "Cold War" is another rare black and white film in the race; Cuarón is also in competition with Polish director of photography Lukasz Zal. He can beat him in these categories, which suggests the possibility that Pawlikowski will accept a second Oscar for Poland.

"Roma" directed by Alfonso Cuarón

Country: Mexico, with nine previous nominations, no win.

Price: Venice: Gold Lion, New York Film Critics: film, director and director, Golden Globes: director and film, Critics Choice Awards: film, director, foreign language and cinematography, Los Angeles Film Critic: film and Cinematography, Director Guild Award: Feature, BAFTAs: Film, Film not available in English, Director, Cinematography.

Distributor: Netflix

Domestic Box Office: Netflix booked the movie in theaters three weeks before it was released on December 14th on the service, but does not report any figures. The film has reported so far about $ 3.5 million in limited-release national revenue on about 250 screens, with a total of 600 film locations around the world. But this has also been observed in 190 countries on Netflix.

Metascore: 96

screen capture

Located in Mexico's old quarter of Cuarón in 1971, "Roma" is a deeply personal portrait of the filmmaker's beloved nanny. While he conjured the film, Cuarón told his brother Carlos, "I want to do it. I just know that I have to do it. I do not know if people will see it. "

Cuarón and his renowned filmmaker, Emmanuel ("Chivo") Lubezki (Oscar winner for "Birdman", "The Revenant" and "Gravity"), presented three inviolable principles.

The story belongs entirely to the real life Cleo. His experience shapes the film.
The memory writes the movie. The details that existed in the past become essential to the story.
The film must be in black and white to relate it to the past, but use the digital to bring its sensitivity to the present.

Cuarón decided to shoot the film on 65mm digital cameras in naturalist black and white. "I wanted it to look like a film from the past, but not nostalgic," he said. "Like the movie, it was the conflict between memory and today. It is also a film that embraces the digital 65: virgin, no grain, incredible dynamic range, to look in the past. "

The resources Cuarón needed – about $ 15 million – came from David Linde, CEO of Participant Media. Linde produced "Y Tu Mama Tambien" and the film "Desierto" from the son of Jonas, son of Cuarón. Cuarón spent 10 minutes summing up the story and Linde was present, although Cuarón said no one else in the company could read the script (which he had neglected). mention at the time, he still had to write).

The schedule shot up to more than 110 days of filming, a schedule that Lubezki could not accommodate. Cuarón shot the film himself.

"In many ways, this film was designed for Chivo," he said last year. "It's one of those ironies. I thought about Chivo and the resources and the time we would have to do. We always complain about the lack of time, we always hurry.

Final result: "Roma" is the most acclaimed favorite in a foreign language. If she were to win, it would be the first time in this category for Mexico. (The "labyrinth" of Guillermo del Toro "won the production design and cinematography, but lost the foreign language in favor of" The lives of others ".) But this year, the" Roma "in black and white, with 10 Oscar nominations, is also in a position to win Best Film, Director and Cinematography After Netflix's exhaustive campaign, some "Roma" are tired, some voters may want to share the wealth with other deserving language candidates foreign.

"The thieves on display", Hirokazu Kore-Eda

Country: Japan, with 16 nominations, four wins (three honorary Oscars).

Distributor: Magnolia Photos

Price: Cannes: Palme d'Or, Los Angeles Film Critics: Best Foreign Film, National Critics' Committee: Best Foreign Film, Palm Springs International Film Festival: Fripresci Award for Best Foreign Film, Vancouver International Film Festival: Most popular international feature film.

Domestic Box Office: $ 3 million.

Metascore: 93

After more than 10 years of separation from the Japanese nuclear family, from "Father like son" to "Our little sister," Kore-eda has turned to "thieves on display" for decades .

Kore-eda told David Ehrlich of IndieWire earlier this year, "It's not my intention. During my career, I've had several recurring themes and patterns, and I have not consciously decided to incorporate them all into this movie, but now that I'm thinking back to this movie, I find that they are all there. "

In "Shoplifters", the Shibata family, three generations of hardscrabble, lives in a hut on the outskirts of Tokyo. Without enough own resources, the parental couple saves a troubled girl who escapes from an abusive home. Kore-eda slowly discretizes the layers of this secret but loving family as the girl becomes a disruptive force.

Kore-eda's goal was to dissect what makes a family. "One of my main achievements in life is that having a child is not enough to make you a parent," Kore-eda said. "I think my films reflect my own sense of crisis about it, and this movie – in which the binder is ultimately neither the kinship nor the time that the Shibata spend together – puts the crisis at its height. "

Final result: This crazy family heart, while he lost many awards for the benefit of "Roma", was a huge success in Japan and reached a universal agreement with a global audience that shocked even Kore-eda. The filmmaker quickly decided to finance and shoot his first European film, "The Truth", in Paris, with Catherine Deneuve, Juliette Binoche and Ethan Hawke.

AGF s.r.l./REX/Shutterstock

"Capernaum", Nadine Labaki

Country: Lebanon, with two nominations, no win.

Price: Cannes: Jury Prize, Melbourne International Film Festival: Best Narrative Feature Film, Mill Valley Film Festival: Best Film in the World, Rotterdam Film Festival: Audience Award, Sarajevo Film Festival: Audience Award, Sao Paolo Film Festival: Audience Award, Stockholm Film Festival: Best Screenplay.

Distributor: Sony Pictures Clbadics

Domestic Box Office: $ 734,063

Metascore: 75.

Sony Pictures Clbadics

The seeds of Nadine Labaki's tenth feature film began to germinate in 2015 with the viral image of a drowned child stranded on a beach in Turkey. "Nobody forgets this show," she says. "At that moment, something started:" If this child could speak, what would he say? What would he say to the world? This was the starting point: begging or working street children in Lebanon, not attending school, not receiving day care, who do not have the most basic rights.

In her research, she sought out the poorest neighborhoods and prisons in Beirut, her hometown, and asked them, "Are you happy to be alive?" "Unfortunately, most of the time, they do not know where they are. Were not happy. : "I do not know when I was born, if someone likes me, I'm hungry, I'd like to be dead." They were beaten, abused or raped. They are very sorry to know what is happening to them. I was trying to become the vehicle that allowed them to express themselves. "

Labaki told the story of a 12-year-old runaway caring for a small child in a slum when the child's mother does not return. The days pbad. He ends up in jail for stabbing and puts his own parents on trial for negligence. "A child can not sue his parents in real life," she said. "He must have a legal guardian, so he can not sue his parents. But I wanted to translate this anger. "

It took four years to complete the script, written with a group of writers, including her husband producer, composer Khaled Mouzanar. Labaki and his team raised funds as they went. "We were sometimes in a very bad situation and had to pay money that we did not have," she said. "We mortgaged our house, we decided to risk everything."

Labaki filmed for six months in dark places in Beirut a natural light, with a small team and non-professional actors, often illiterate, and mounted for two years. "Every detail was inspired by something we saw," she said. "We had to be open and create a space for the actors to be themselves. We do not paralyze them with complicated camera movements. We stay mobile and capture who they are. "

The filmmaker was haunted by his memory of returning home after a late night party and stopping at a traffic light to see a child about a year old with his beggar mother sitting on a tiny block so uncomfortable cement that he was falling asleep and waking up because he could not sleep. It restores this event in a heartbreaking sequence of the film while the boy (Zain Al Rafeea) panics while his baby loads rocking to the edge of a teeming road.

"In the film, while we were shooting the scene, no one was watching," Labaki said. "And it's really happening. We fired almost invisible and well mixed, so no one noticed us. It's fascinating and upsetting. We are all used to these invisible people excluded from our system. It's almost like the decor of our cities, these belts of misery are part of the decor. "

The painful sequence of the prison required a long negotiation process to obtain a filming permit; the inmates in the movie are real. "We have a lot of opposition because the government members do not want to show what's going on," she said. "We had to try to convince people that if they want things to change, they have to show what that is."

Final result: This crowdpleaser attracts the public and corrects him, which allows him to stand out from the competition for a place in the top five. But it will be difficult to leave before "Roma" or "cold war".

"Never look further," Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck

Country: Germany, 11 nominations, two victories, including that of the filmmaker "The life of others".

Price: Oscar nominations: Cinematography

Distributor: Sony Pictures Clbadics

Box Office: $ 109,438

Metascore: 68

After "The lives of others" won the Oscar, the German society wunderkind went to Hollywood and directed the famous flop Angelina Jolie-Johnny Depp, "The Tourist". Back in Germany, Henckel von Donnersmarck was keen to preserve his native language for this elegant portrait of the world of a postwar artist, modeled on the life and art of Gerhard Richter.

Filming in English "would have avoided this film from being truthful and having an impact," said the filmmaker, inspired by the film about Richter's story, inspired by German journalist Jürgen Schreiber. "He had made a beautiful painting of himself as a little child held by his aunt, who later revealed to be based on a snapshot of his childhood."

According to Schreiber, Richter's aunt was murdered by the Nazis because of her schizophrenia. "The reporter discovered that Richter's father had finally got married was a senior SS doctor responsible for much of the Nazi euthanasia program, where they murdered people with disorders." development and disability, "said Henckel von Donnersmarck. "If you look at the work, his portrait of his father-in-law, he must have known at a certain level. The film was a way to explore how criminals and victims lived under the same roof in the same family. Sometimes we have intuition and see things we can not know. That's what art should do. "

Ryan Joel / Invision / AP / REX / Shutterstock

After researching the era and the post-war art scene in East and West Germany and having interviewed Richter and the artist David Hockney, Henckel von Donnersmarck wrote a screenplay in nine months and lined up director of photography Caleb Deschanel ") which he admired the work since he had seen" The Black Stallion "at seven. "It has a completely incredible way of guiding the viewer through his light," said Henckel von Donnersmarck, "but never in an obvious way, always serving the story."

He also called on an international team, from the "The Tourist" makeup and hair team, to several of his "The Lives of Others" collaborators, including French editor Patricia Rommel and costume designer Gabriela. Binder. "It was a Babel of different languages," said Henckel von Donnersmarck. "People did not know German. We all speak Esperanto of the world: cinematographic language. "

The director was following the career of actor Tom Schilling since he had discovered the high school student while he was at the film school and asked him to play Richter in the face of the veteran's. The lives of others, "Sebastian Koch, as SS's stepfather.

Sony Pictures Clbadics appeared very early in the ambitious film, which covers 30 years in 67 days of shooting, from the bombing of Dresden by special effects, through the socialist formative years of the young artist and his transformation to the age of 30 years old, when he started in the West. "So he's really free," said Henckel von Donnersmarck. "We were shaped by totalitarian regimes, shaped by authority. To find your own voice, you must ignore specific expectations, ideas, and beliefs. This is the journey of this artist: the journey of the mystical hero of Joseph Campbell, where the artist tries to find his own voice. "

The creation of art was a huge challenge. "We had to get this part properly, otherwise all the film would not work," said the filmmaker, who happily met one of Richter's students, Andreas Schön, at a ceremony in San Diego, and convinced him to use the old Richter techniques. create original art for the film. "He would take the photos, mount them and project them with a stethoscope, and Andreas Schön would paint them on a photocell. Richter the fuzzy with the format technique. Schön has spent the last 20 years trying to free himself from Richter and his influence. "

The film also deployed a fleet of painters to reconstruct "degenerate" works destroyed by the Germans. The director still keeps them in Berlin, but promised to destroy the counterfeits.

Just like "The lives of others" (but with an epic duration of three hours and nine minutes), "Never Look Away" was adopted in Germany only after the Oscar nomination. It has not been adopted by Richter either. "The spirit of the film is to overcome the difficulties and use art as a healing tool," said Henckel von Donnersmarck. "It's a positive film, which is not the angle that the German distributor used with the German trailer. They marketed it as a super dark thriller. I still think it's not a good idea. Your presentation of a movie should be honest. I think this factor has contributed to a slow start; I am convinced that we will have a good finish. "

Final result: The last film released from the grid is still in distribution, which puts it at the center of the concerns of the voters of the Academy. They tend to react to movies about art, especially films as elegant as this one. But time is an obstacle.

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