One Category at a Time: Foreign Language Film

Once considered a critical laughing stock for its arcane regulations and the dubious qualities of its nominees and winners, Best Foreign Language Film has slowly but surely gained some legitimacy over the last few years. Sure, the system ain't perfect (nor will it ever be), but the implementation of the executive nominating committee has yielded some solid rosters lately.

Of course, the general nominating membership is still prone to some of their milquetoast tendancies...

My Award Nominations: Best Foreign Film

Oscar voting closes today, and believe it or not, there are still some nominees that haven't even been made available for public consumption. One of them is Argentinian foreign language film hopeful Wild Tales, which you won't find on my own Best Foreign Film ballot for the obvious reason that I haven't seen it yet.

On that note, I'll remind you of the three-word caveat that always accompanies my own choices for this category every single year: "Subject to change". I am often forced to amend and improve my five nominees up to several months (sometimes years) after the fact because there's so much good world cinema out there and so little of it gets released in North America in a timely fashion. Among the buzziest international titles from 2014 that I still have to see are the aforementioned Wild Tales (which I may be able to catch just before the Oscars), Godard's Farewell to Language, and Hungarian festival sensation White God.

That being said, even if those or any other subtitled latecomers never make it to my screen, I'd still feel adequately satisfied with these five terrific films.