Nate Jones
Appearances
Today, Explained
The messiest Oscars category
Amelia Perez is a film that, you know, takes place in Mexico, has an international cast, but was filmed in France. So it is the French submission.
Today, Explained
The messiest Oscars category
No, because you, uh, you are pretty... The modern world of cinema is so blurred in terms of international boundaries that sort of pinpointing a specific film and saying this specific film belongs to this specific country doesn't always make sense.
Today, Explained
The messiest Oscars category
This is an issue that's come up in the past, I want to say, like 15 years in response to another problem that they used to have, which was that films had to take place in the language of the submitting country. You know, you can see all the ways that that would kind of run into issues.
Today, Explained
The messiest Oscars category
You know, if you make a film about immigrants in, say, a European country and it is mostly told in the language of the country that they came from, suddenly that movie is not eligible to be nominated. They got rid of that rule in the late 2000s, which I think was a good change to make. But then now downstream of that, we have this other kind of weird situation.
Today, Explained
The messiest Oscars category
Well, it's interesting. I think one of the things that we are seeing is a result of the reforms that the Academy made to their membership.
Today, Explained
The messiest Oscars category
So if you remember, in the wake of Oscars So White, the Academy really expanded how many people it invited per year. I think it's now about half of the membership has been invited since 2016. And if you remember the headlines for them expanding the membership, it was, we are going to get a lot more women in and we're going to get a lot more people of color in.
Today, Explained
The messiest Oscars category
And then kind of in a little asterisk below them, it was, and we will also get a lot more international voters in. But as we've seen in the results from the past decade or so, the international voters are the ones who have had the biggest, most obvious effect, where it is now sort of no longer a surprise that a foreign language film would get nominated for Best Picture.
Today, Explained
The messiest Oscars category
In fact, this year we have two nominated for Best Picture for the first time ever. Just because there's so many more international voters, that has kind of increased the salience of the international film category, where it used to be that category was kind of a little sidebar to the main competition.
Today, Explained
The messiest Oscars category
And now, increasingly, what we're seeing is films that are competing in international film, they are competing all across the ballot. You know, Emilia Perez, the French submission, led the field with 13 nominations.
Today, Explained
The messiest Oscars category
And as we saw last year, not getting selected doesn't doom you. There was a little controversy last year over Justine Triest's Anatomy of a Fall, which was a very popular, critically acclaimed French film, won the Palme d'Or, but was not selected as the French submission.
Today, Explained
The messiest Oscars category
And there was a lot of scuttlebutt over why that was. People think it was because the director criticized Emmanuel Macron in her Palme d'Or acceptance speech. But anyway, it wasn't selected. And that kind of turned out to not really matter much. It still got nominated for Best Picture. It got nominated for Best Director at one screenplay. So, you know, it still did very well.
Today, Explained
The messiest Oscars category
But in general, yeah, what we are seeing is like the Best International Film category is kind of like a handhold on a rock ledge. And, you know, you start from that and then you kind of move up into these other categories.
Today, Explained
The messiest Oscars category
It's funny. I'll put it this way. That opinion is certainly shared by some old guard members of Hollywood. And they make the point that, you know, every country kind of has its own Oscars, right? France has the Césars. Spain has the Goyas. And, you know, the Césars and the Goyas don't give out all their awards to American and British films. So they're like, these countries have their own awards.
Today, Explained
The messiest Oscars category
Why can't the Oscars be for American films? And I understand that. And it is a debate that has happened, honestly, throughout Oscar history. It goes back as far as, you know, the 1940s when you would have British films. I believe it was Laurence Olivier's Hamlet won Best Picture in the late 1940s.
Today, Explained
The messiest Oscars category
And you saw very similar complaints where people said, you know, how dare they? You know, we helped them win the war and then their movies come over and steal best picture from us. So this is a debate that has been going on for a while. But what I say when people bring that complaint up to me, my point is that I don't think it diminishes the Oscars to include the best films from world cinema.
Today, Explained
The messiest Oscars category
I think it enhances them. I think it sort of adds to the reputation that, like, no, this is the big one. Like, this is the World Cup of award ceremonies. And I think that only makes the power of the Oscar even more strong.
Today, Explained
The messiest Oscars category
I think there are a couple things you can do. The main argument the Academy has for keeping the one country, one film rule is that they are kind of worried, understandably, that voters would get like very Eurocentric, that you just have two films from Italy, two films from France, and maybe, you know, one film from Taiwan.
Today, Explained
The messiest Oscars category
One solution that I thought of maybe was that, you know, we already have, there's an academy committee. It is a self-selected committee of people who have worked in international films. And they are the ones who narrow down, you know, the 80, 90 submissions every year into a 15 film shortlist.
Today, Explained
The messiest Oscars category
And so I say, you know, why not put those people in charge of also determining what the best film from each country would be?
Today, Explained
The messiest Oscars category
What I have been told is that they see it as empowering the other countries. It's like the Olympics or the World Cup. The people who run the World Cup, FIFA, do not tell Germany what players to select for their team. I understand that logic. Even though, you know, I like my way, I think it's good, but I can understand why they think that.
Today, Explained
The messiest Oscars category
I do think that we need this category, if only because, you know, I just said that there are two films in this year's field nominated for Best Picture. Usually there's only one. Sometimes there's zero. And so I think having this category still lets a film like Seat of the Sacred Fig, which was not nominated for Best Picture, you know, this is a place to celebrate that film.
Today, Explained
The messiest Oscars category
And yes, I think, you know, in a perfect world, we'd have a totally equal playing field and people would, you know, slot in international films in their mental headspace alongside of Hollywood films very easily. But, you know, But, you know, we don't live in a perfect world.
Today, Explained
The messiest Oscars category
And so I think it's good to kind of have this little place that lets Academy members sort of gives them a window into what's happening outside the U.S.
Today, Explained
The messiest Oscars category
So there are a couple things wrong with the international film category. So basically, how the international film category works is that the award does not go to a director, it does not go to a filmmaker, it goes to a country. And so the way it works is that every country in the world submits one film.
Today, Explained
The messiest Oscars category
So dozens, sometimes hundreds of countries, they submit their films to the Oscars and you only get one. So if there's two great films from Switzerland, in one year? Doesn't matter. Only one. The second big issue is that the people deciding who submits these films to the Oscars are not Academy members. They are often artists, but often government ministers. from overseas governments.
Today, Explained
The messiest Oscars category
And so one of the things you quite often see in the best international film race is that any film that is sort of remotely critical of certain governments from certain countries just have 0% chance of getting it. Unless, as we are seeing this year, they can kind of get rescued in a way by just sort of the lucky happenstance of being co-produced by a country that is not the film they are set in.
Today, Explained
The messiest Oscars category
So that is what's happened with Seed of the Sacred Fig where, you know, they're quite lucky. I was talking to an Oscar strategist last week that they said, you know, the Academy is super duper lucky that that film had a German production company so that it was able to be submitted by Germany.
Today, Explained
The messiest Oscars category
because it would have been just a terrible look if this very well-acclaimed film with this amazing story behind it just couldn't get nominated for the Oscars because it was too critical of its own government. Like, that's a bad look.
Today, Explained
The messiest Oscars category
There's also kind of the nagging question of does it make sense to identify specific films with specific countries anymore? Like as we're seeing with Seed of the Sacred Fig, it is an Iranian and German co-production. There's an amazing film that wasn't submitted by India called All We Imagine is Light that was an Indian-French co-production.