And the final nine contenders for Best Foreign Film Oscar are…

January 16, 2008

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The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has settled on nine films that will keep competing for the Oscar in the Best Foreign Language Film category. The films in question are:

The Counterfeiters (Austria)
The Year My Parents Went on Vacation (Brazil)
Days of Darkness (Canada)
Beaufort (Israel)
The Unknown (Italy)
Mongol (Kazakhstan)
Katyn (Poland)
12 (Russia)
The Trap (Serbia)

The three leading contenders prior to the big twist – Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days and Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly – have all been unexpectedly left out of the race this year.

Having seen 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days and Persepolis, I can’t say that I wasn’t hoping that there was at least one other movie out there that may have a chance of winning the Oscar in spite of all the film festival hype that the Romanian and French flick have been given this year. Even though they are both excellent movies and everyone should probably add them to their must see list, they have their weak points. The Romanian film is basically a post-feminist riff on Thelma and Louise set in the desensitized post-Tarantino age and Persepolis, even though movingly confessional at times, does not really aim for much more than entertainment.

On the other side, The Trap, the only film I’ve seen of the nine contenders, is just nowhere nearly as good as either of the two films mentioned above. Serbia has always been above average when it came to film production and The Trap, sadly, does not hold up to those standards. A full review is coming later this week, so I’ll just stop here.

The last round of voting will take place after the screenings this weekend and the final five nominees for Best Foreign Language Film will be announced on Tuesday.