Garbage In Garbage Out, or Why the Foreign Oscars Need to be Blown UpThis corner of the Academy Awards is rife with garbage, and almost inevitably, the garbage out results in a quintet of mediocrities (and some baddies) like The Counterfeiters (Stefan Ruzowitzky, Austria), Katyn (Andrzej Wajda, Poland), Beaufort (Joseph Cedar, Israel), Mongol (Sergei Bodrov, Kazakhstan) and 12 (Nikita Mikhalkov, Russia). The media’s dominant angle on the “missing” nominees (most oft-cited include various pet titles like Marjane Satrapi’s and Vincent Paronnaud’s wildly overrated Persepolis, Fatih Akin’s disastrous The Edge of Heaven, Lee Chang-dong’s should-have-won-the-Palme masterpiece Secret Sunshine, Carlos Reygadas’ astonishing Silent Light and, perhaps most indefensibly, J.A. Bayona’s less-than-scary The Orphanage) utterly misses the more serious issues confronting the Academy. This isn’t surprising: It’s easier stirring up froth about why the widely-liked The Band’s Visit was DQ’d (an excess of spoken English dialogue, a cardinal sin given the award’s name) than looking inside the very yucky interior of this category.
If they did, they’d find a bad, bad smell inside. . . .
Robert Koehler, FilmJourney.org, February 23