The Last Cinema Standing Countdown to the Oscars is your guide to the Academy Awards. We will cover each of the categories in depth, talk about history and what the award truly means, and predict some winners. Check back all month as we make our way to the big show, one category (each as important as the next) at a time.
Best International Feature
The nominees are:
Drive My Car
Flee
The Hand of God
Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom
The Worst Person in the World
Bong Joon-ho probably said it best a couple years ago in the run up to his film Parasite winning four Oscars, including Best Picture, when he called the Academy Awards a “local award.” It sounds a bit derisive, but for most of the history of the organization, that has been undeniably true, with the Academy recognizing primarily US or UK films. The triumph of Parasite, perhaps, signaled a move away from that localized focus.
For the fourth year in a row, a film not primarily in English is nominated for Best Picture (Roma in 2018, Parasite in 2019, Minari in 2020, and Drive My Car this year). That is one film per year and there will always be room for more, but it is a start. One could see a future in which international films are treated to the same Academy Awards bounty as films from the US.
Of this year’s five International Feature nominees, three are nominated in other categories, not to mention Spanish master Pedro Almodovar’s Parallel Mothers, which is not nominated here but is nominated in two other categories. International films are already a huge part of the Oscars, they are here to stay, and they are only getting more important.
Drive My Car (Japan) – After The Power of the Dog, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s three-hour meditation on loss and grief is the next-best reviewed film of the year. It is nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director. It is an arthouse hit with more than $5 million in box office receipts, and after dropping on HBO Max, it is the most widely seen and talked about nominee of the bunch.
All the accolades and attention, however, can have the effect of clouding the reality of what the film is. Though a similar phenomenon, this is not Parasite, which is a twisty, edge-of-your-seat thriller that’s just a whole lot of fun. Drive My Car is more meditative, more contemplative. It needs to wash over you. Any movie that reaches three hours needs to justify that runtime, and Hamaguchi does so by investing deeply in each of his characters and making the audience empathize with every one of them. The world is so fully formed that by the end, it feels like no time at all has passed.
The Worst Person in the World (Norway) – Directed by Joachim Trier and co-written by Trier and Eskil Vogt, who are nominated for Best Original Screenplay, The Worst Person in the World injects new life into the coming-of-adulthood genre that has grown more prevalent in recent years. There are shades of Frances Ha in this tale of a young Oslo woman attempting to navigate life and love in a modern world, but this film also grapples with darker themes of regret, morality, and death in ways the Noah Baumbach-Greta Gerwig film did not.
Starring Renate Reinsve, who in a just world would be competing for Best Actress, the film chronicles its main character’s slow awakening to the person she is and would like to be. She is not perfect – though she is far from the worst person in the world – and Trier allows her to make mistakes and do bad things without ever judging her. Like so many of us, she is doing her best, and the film argues that as we figure out who we are and what we want to do, our best is all we can offer.
Flee (Denmark) – As mentioned last time, Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s animated documentary is the only film ever nominated for all three of Animated, Documentary, and International Feature. It is wholly deserving of that place in history, as a harrowing document of life on the run from an atrocity. Perhaps the best thing about Flee, though, is the wonderful balance Rasmussen and his subject, “Amin,” strike between the darkness of the details and the humor and humanity of simply surviving. It is a reminder that being alive is, in and of itself, worth celebrating sometimes.
Danish films have a surprisingly strong recent track record in the International Feature (formerly Foreign Language) category. In the past 12 years, Denmark has had seven films nominated at the Academy Awards, with two going on to win the prize. That includes last year’s excellent Another Round, by Thomas Vinterberg. Those seven films also represent six different directors (Vinterberg is twice nominated in that span), suggesting we are living in an exciting time for the Danish film industry.
The Hand of God (Italy) – Truth be told, this one beguiles me. Paolo Sorrentino’s coming-of-age drama seems to be well liked. It certainly is critically acclaimed. But, it escapes me. I found it a tad slow and navel-gazing. I enjoyed Sorrentino’s earlier The Great Beauty, which won this category in 2013, as a modern riff on La Dolce Vita. It felt, then, like the decadence had a point. But after Youth, which I found interminable, and this film, I look back on The Great Beauty with a different lens and find it more flawed than at first I did.
Sorrentino, the only Italian filmmaker to land in this category in the past 15 years, never gives us much of a reason to care about the characters he depicts. The meandering, self-obsessed plots no longer seem like a commentary on the venality of Italian society, but rather a stylistic crutch for a filmmaker who has little interest in investigating the world outside his own orbit.
Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom (Bhutan) – The shortlist of finalists for International Feature this year is stacked with popular, critically acclaimed titles and directors beloved by the Academy. These included A Hero, Compartment No. 6, I’m Your Man, Hive, and Lamb. Any would have been a deserving and expected nominee. Instead, this light-hearted drama with a seemingly odd title from Bhutanese director Pawo Choyning Dorji beat them all to the punch. And, you know what? I’m glad it did.
This is not a better film than some of the ones I just named – though it is better than The Hand of God – but this nomination ensured I would spend a little under two joyful hours getting to visit this world. The film follows an aspiring singer doing his required national service work as a teacher who gets sent to the small village of Lunana way up in the mountains. The beats of a story about a reluctant teacher growing to love his new assignment and students are familiar, but the uniqueness of this setting and quietness of the story are absolutely winning. As the first film from Bhutan to compete for an Oscar, Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom is a truly pleasant surprise.
The final analysis
In a post-Parasite world, the statistic remains true: No film nominated for both Best Picture and Best International Feature has failed to win International Feature. On a number of levels, this makes perfect sense, and there is no compelling case to be made in any other direction this year.
If we want to pretend there could be drama simply for the sake of doing so, The Worst Person in the World is beloved and clearly has support, given its Original Screenplay nomination, while the history-making Flee sure feels like it needs to win something. But, as far as this category goes, that is all window dressing. It’s Drive My Car, and it’s not close.
Will win: Drive My Car
Should win: The Worst Person in the World
Should have been here: Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn
Next time: Best Documentary Feature
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