My Award nominations: Foreign Film

Just getting this category in under the wire because some titles waited until the last possible moment to open up. Anyway, I should always start with the disclaimer that my Best Foreign Film shortlist is often subject to change or revision if I eventually catch up with titles that I couldn't see in time (note that I haven't seen Blue Is the Warmest Color yet, but I may consider it next year when it'll be eligible for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar).

Check out the world cinema I most responded to this year.

One Category at a Time: Foreign Language Film

Last year was the first year that this category was open to all voting members of the Academy, courtesy of screener DVDs sent to all of AMPAS. Of course, with Amour also nominated for Best Picture that year, predicting this category was a no-brainer. Unfortunately for us this year, we have no clear frontrunner to point to a predictable result. Last year's obvious outcome made it impossible for us to truly gauge what sort of film will appeal to the entire Academy as opposed to the tiny older contingent that used to vote on this category. Let's take a look at the nominees:

My Award nominations: Adapted Score

Surprise! I'm adding a category to my list of superlatives this year.

But first, a confession: Even though many voices on the Oscar-web (with sharper ears then mine) have long called for the Academy to reinstate this defunct category, I can honestly understand why they haven't. I myself would struggle to find enough applicable soundtracks in one year that add so much to their films as to merit awards attention. This year, however, was something of a banner year for this oft overlooked microcosm of film music, and so I figure I may as well recognize the best of them.

Throughout the 70s and 80s, the Academy kept renaming and finagling with this category, but they usually only nominated three at a time, so here are my top three Adapted Scores of the year:

Capsule reviews for the first day of winter

Up here in the icy GTA (which felt not unlike the glacial Arendelle of Frozen this past week) it's easy for me to forget that winter hasn't officially hit us until today. Perhaps that because I so closely associate winter with the Oscar season, which lasts much longer than a mere three months. For me, that means a glut of November/December prestige titles to catch up on; more than I can possibly write full reviews for. So here are some 1-2 sentence reactions to various films I've taken in so far. I may add more as I see them.

Wadjda and The Past smarting after surprising omission from Foreign shortlist

It happens every year (even with the dubious executive committee) that a number of celebrated films from world cinema fail to make the Academy's shortlist of nine for Best Foreign Language film. It's a cruel but necessary process to cull the mammoth list of submissions (76 entries this year) down to a manageable number.

The Past, Asghar Farhadi's followup to his Oscar-winning A Separation, is one of the high-profile casualties this year I haven't yet seen it, but have actually heard mixed things about it. The snub that stings the most for me personally was Haifaa Al-Mansour's Wadjda from Saudi Arabia, which is just a wonderful movie. Plain and simple. I think if it had been nominated, it would have been in good position to win the whole thing, but now we'll never know.

Among the surviving nine, the ones I've so far seen include Belgium's The Broken Circle Breakdown, Hong Kong's The Grandmaster, and Denmark's The Hunt. All three certainly have their champions, but I wasn't all that taken with the former two. The Hunt, however, is quite good, and may well be the one to watch for the win (... if it gets nominated, of course -- you never can tell with this branch).

The Broken Circle Breakdown (Belgium)
An Episode in the Life of an Iron Picker (Bosnia and Herzegovina)
The Missing Picture (Cambodia)
The Hunt (Denmark)
Two Lives (Germany)
The Grandmaster (Hong Kong)
The Notebook (Hungary)
The Great Beauty (Italy)
Omar (Palestine)