Is There Any Way to Fix Oscar’s International Film Category?

By
Nate Jones,
a Vulture senior writer covering movies and pop culture

Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez.
Photo: PAGE 114 – WHY NOT PRODUCTIONS – PATHÉ FILMS – FRANCE 2 CINÉMA

The reigning champ in Oscar’s Best International Film category is The Zone of Interest, a film directed by an Englishman, shot in Poland, and whose dialogue is mostly German. Though filmmaker Jonathan Glazer accepted the trophy, the award technically went to the nation of Great Britain — the Brits’ first Oscar win in this category, and their first nominee not in Welsh.

This year, the International frontrunner appears to be Emilia Pérez, a trans-empowerment musical that received 13 Oscar nominations. Though the film takes place in Mexico, and is largely in Spanish, it’s the French submission. This is because it was written and directed by a Frenchman, and shot on a soundstage outside Paris — a testament both to the French creative imagination, and also their long history of messing with Mexico. If the musical falters — a scenario that appears slightly more plausible now that the Internet has resurfaced hateful and racist tweets from star Karla Sofía Gascón — then one alternative could be The Seed of the Sacred Fig, a ripped-from-the-headlines drama about the protests that gripped Iran in 2022. It is, naturally, the German submission.

As the Academy’s membership has grown steadily more international over the last decade, the Oscar field has undergone its own version of globalization. This season marks the seventh year in a row a foreign-language film has been nominated in Best Picture. (Two, in fact, made it in this year, as the Brazilian entry I’m Still Here joined Emilia Pérez in the Academy ten.) The International Film category is no longer a sidebar to the wider Oscar competition, but a springboard into it.

However, this has only increased the number of eyeballs on what may be the Academy’s most complicated submission process. Since its inception, the international category has operated by the rule of “one country, one film.” If a nation produces two great works of cinema in a single year, sorry, one’s gotta go. Determining which movie makes it through is the job of each country’s selection committee. Some countries’ committees are affiliated with official government bodies, like Brazil’s Ministry of Culture; others’ are part of independent organizations, like Ireland’s IFTA. The Academy mandates only that “filmmakers, artists and craftspeople” must comprise a majority of each selection committee.

With this new spotlight comes a growing awareness of the flaws of the current system. In a world of international co-productions — The Zone of Interest has five credited production companies, based in three different countries — it may no longer make sense for a film to be identified with one individual nation. Furthermore the selection process can’t help but embroil the Oscars in domestic political conflicts. In countries where the ministries control the committee, films that are considered too critical of their governments have little chance of being submitted. Filtering the race through nations also encourages the unhealthy kind of international competition such as we’re currently seeing around Emilia Pérez, which Brazil and Mexico have teamed up to take down.

But the biggest issue for me is that, alone among the Oscar categories, International Film puts people who are not in the Academy in charge of what Academy members can and cannot nominate. This has been an especially hot topic the past three seasons, which have each seen popular contenders go unselected by their home nations. Two years ago it was the Telugu-language epic RRR out of India. Last year, the French legal drama Anatomy of a Fall. This season another Indian film, the Cannes prize-winner All We Imagine as Light. Fortunately, this is no longer a death knell for a film’s trophy chances. Oscar voters awarded RRR Best Original Song, and treated Anatomy of a Fall as a major contender, handing it Best Original Screenplay alongside nominations in Picture, Director, and Actress. But All We Imagine as Light was less lucky: Despite scoring a Golden Globe nom for director Payal Kapadia, the film was shut out at last week’s Oscar nominations.

Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light.
Photo: Condor

Pundits enjoy Monday-morning quarterbacking these selection decisions, especially ones that seem to boil down to petty, cliquish reasons. When Anatomy of a Fall was snubbed by France, rumors swirled that the committee had not looked kindly on director Justine Triet using her Palme d’Or acceptance speech to slam president Emmanuel Macron’s pension reform plan, after accepting government funding for the film. (Triet fans had the last laugh once the French selection, the culinary romance The Taste of Things, went un-nominated.) But the stakes are often considerably higher.

Take Seed of the Sacred Fig, which begins as a family drama then gradually expands into a wholesale indictment of the Iranian legal system. The film was shot in secret, with director Mohammad Rasoulof guiding the cast and crew remotely. Shortly before Sacred Fig premiered at Cannes, that same legal system issued a warrant for Rasoulof’s arrest, forcing him to flee the country. As you might expect, Iran did not choose the film as its official entry. That Sacred Fig remained eligible for International Film is partly down to Rasoulof’s decision to go into exile in Germany. (Academy rules state that creative control must have been “largely in the hands of citizens or residents of the submitting country”; the fact that Sacred Fig was co-produced by a German company likely helped as well.)

That’s an extreme case, but similar stories occur every year. All We Imagine As Light, a kitchen-sink drama about nurses in Mumbai, may be less explicitly political, but as Siddhant Adlakha outlines, Kapadia’s film operates as a subtle reproach to the Hindu-nationalist politics of the Modi government, which may hint at why it too went unselected. Further west, last summer saw 20 Greek filmmakers withdraw their movies from consideration in protest over governmental interference in the selection committee.

Is there any way to reform the International Film race? The Academy has not been afraid to make minor changes to the category. A few years ago, they got rid of the name Best Foreign-Language Film, in recognition of the fact that, for many Americans, Spanish and Mandarin are not “foreign” at all. Before that, they waived a rule that mandated a film’s dialogue must be in a submitting country’s official language, which ruled out titles like Michael Haneke’s Caché. And the Academy continues to tinker with the nomination process. (If you’re curious: A self-selected committee of around 1,000 members with ties to the international film industry narrows the dozens of submissions down to a shortlist of 15, after which a second committee of similar size decides the five nominees.)

I’ve long wondered if the category might be better served by doing away with the overseas submission boards entirely. The Academy already has its own committees pruning down the field — why not empower members to decide each country’s official selection, as well? The most interesting counterargument to this was the one put forth by representatives of the Indian committee to explain why they didn’t select All We Imagine as Light. Kapadia’s film, they said, felt less like an Indian movie and more like a European movie filmed in India. (Indeed, it was a French co-production, and in a world without Emilia Pérez, might have wound up their submission instead.) In the committee’s view, their mission was not to simply choose the film with the best shot of being nominated, but to ensure that India’s robust filmmaking tradition would be represented. That’s an argument worth respecting. So too is the question of whether getting rid of these committees would only further empower the international-cinephile class that dominates institutions like Cannes. These are the people who have showered Emilia Pérez with acclaim — a reminder this cohort has its fair share of biases, as well.

In conversations with the Academy, I get the impression that, like any large organization, they are not ready to immediately throw out decades of precedent in response to a few scandals. They see the International Film category as akin to the World Cup or the Olympics — a forum for countries to put their best against everyone else’s, while letting the countries themselves decide how they want to be represented. And they remain adamant that the “one country, one film” rule is the only thing preventing voters from nominating a bunch of French and Italian movies every year.

“The idea that every country can be represented is as equitable as the U.N.,” says Neon CEO Tom Quinn, whose indie studio is a frequent player in the International Film race. (They’ve won it with Parasite, and seen Anatomy of a Fall go unselected. Sacred Fig is their nominee this year.) “But on the flip side, this is not Eurovision.” Quinn says that the “one country, one film” rule misrepresents the state of international cinema in any given year. Imagine the Best Picture race if they only allowed one submission per studio.

Quinn proposes scrapping that rule. He points to the Golden Globes, whose own foreign-language category remains interesting and diverse despite featuring no such restrictions. But he would not do away with selection committees entirely. Instead, he suggests expanding all the specialty categories — International Film, Documentary Feature, and Animated Feature — to ten nominees, matching Best Picture. Maybe seven or eight International spots would be filled by films submitted by the committees. The extra spots could be filled by Academy members as they see fit, to ensure that worthy films that went unsubmitted could still get their due.

Quinn’s plan, like others, has its pluses and minuses, and I can imagine it raising questions about category inflation across the board. But it would go some way to alleviating the downside for films like All We Imagine as Light, which most everyone agrees deserve to show up somewhere on the Oscar ballot.

“The individuals in the Academy who are working on this are extremely conscientious of this issue, and obviously want the best films represented across the five final nominees,” Quinn says. “But any single film missed is a career that has been overlooked.”

Another of this year’s International Film nominees is the Latvian entry, Flow, which holds a few distinctions in this year’s race. Most notably it’s an animated film, about a group of animals from different species teaming up to survive a flood. But it’s also proof that the Academy was right to rename the former Foreign Language category, because this film does not employ any human language at all — just meows, squawks, and barks. I thought Flow might be the first nominee of its kind, but after digging around, I discovered it’s actually the second wordless film to be nominated in the International category. The first was an Algerian movie from 1983 called Le Bal, which is in a language all its own … the language of dance!

Directed by Italian communist Ettore Scola, Le Bal is a metaphorical journey through 50 years of French history, told entirely through choreography. From the Popular Front to World War II to the Algerian War, it’s basically a dream-ballet version of Mitterrand: A Study in Ambiguity. The movie lost the Oscar to Fanny & Alexander, which I don’t think anyone would quibble with, but still, what a fascinating cultural object. I’ve embedded the film’s trailer above. The full version can be found on YouTube with very little digging.

– A dispatch from a more innocent time when everything was coming up Emilia Pérez.

– A detailed timeline of every single Emilia Pérez controversy.

– A story that does not mention Emilia Pérez at all.