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The foreign-language Oscar committee finally gets it (kind of) right

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The foreign-language Oscar committee has taken more lumps than Massachusetts Democrats, so it’s a relief of sorts to find that the category’s shortlist has few eyebrow-raisers this year.

Two years ago, cineastes and Academy completists will remember, the committee (which has to vouch that it has seen every movie before submitting its shortlist of nine) overlooked the Cannes and critical darling ‘4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.’ That caused feather-ruffling that wouldn’t be out of place at an avian sanctuary. So last year the committee rejiggered its rules so that three of the nine shortlisted movies were chosen by the executive committee, in a bid to correct any oversights the larger committee may have made. Nice idea, but it didn’t work, as another Cannes and critical darling, the Italian-language mobster movie “Gommorah,” did not make the cut.

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This year, there are no obvious snubs: Both foreign films that had been on most pundits’ lists, Michael Haneke’s Palme d’Or winner “The White Ribbon,” out of Germany, and France’s immigrant-gangster film, “A Prophet,” are on the shortlist. The Romanians get the cold shoulder again as the excellent Cold War morality play ‘Police, Adjective’ misses the list, though given the only limited buzz the film has been generating, that’s more of a modest oversight. (You can read the full list here.)

But it should be noted that there weren’t nearly as many foreign-language favorites this year – in fact, “Prophet” and “White Ribbon” were pretty much all anyone was talking about, so it would have been pretty hard to see a major snub (though if anyone could manage that trick, the foreign-language committee could).

Maybe more interesting is the movies that did make it, and, more specifically, the territories from which they come.

We’ve been hearing for a while now from global cinema types that film culture has reached into unknown corners, and this year’s shortlist may offer some of the best proof of that. Neither Bulgaria (“The World Is Big and Salvation Lurks Around the Corner”), Australia (“Samson & Delilah”) nor Peru (“The Milk of Sorry”) has ever had a film nominated for a foreign-language Oscar. Though the Old World hasn’t exactly gone away: The two frontrunners, France and Germany, have collectively been nominated a total of 49 times.

-- Steven Zeitchik

Photo. ‘The White Ribbon.’ Credit: Films du Losange/Sony Pictures

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