Myopia is the speciality of the foreign-language film Oscar, which is often given to something bland and inoffensive rather than what posterity might be eyeing up: The Secret in Their Eyes beating both The White Ribbon and A Prophet in 2010, and the Japanese film Departures over The Class the year before are just a couple of recent bungles. It can't be easy narrowing down a planet's worth of cinema, but added to these headline-making slipups are the continuing problems with the selection process for this notoriously wrong-headed category.
Every country is invited to submit its strongest film – provided it fulfils a host of small-print conditions – for inclusion on the longlist. The dialogue track mustn't be in English, but since 2006 it doesn't have to be in the language of the submitting country either: that's how Aki Kaurismäki's Le Havre, set in the French port, got the nod for Finland this year.
That decision was one acknowledgment of how borders have dissolved in the film world – as in the world in general – but in so many other respects the selection process is stuck in the rigid past. Not only does the one-country, one-nomination system eliminate quality work if, God forbid, a nation should produce more than one heavyweight film in a year, it also discriminates against the international co-productions that are an increasingly integral part of the global weave of cinema. Oscar still gets a confused look in his eye when these cases of shared ownership arise.
The Motorcycle Diaries was one film that fell between the cracks this way, and the arbitration disputes are becoming more visible as the spirit of international collaboration deepens. American director Joshua Marston, whose 2004 drug-mule film Maria Full of Grace was disqualified for not being Colombian enough, is fast becoming martyr boy for having the wrong passport. This year his film about Albania's vendetta culture, The Forgiveness of Blood, was pulled as that country's entrant for, yes, not being Albanian enough – despite the subject matter, and the fact that cast, crew and set were predominantly local. An Albanian director, Bujar Alimani, had complained about the decision to the Academy committee, who reviewed the choice in favour of Alimani's own film.
How did Kaurismäki get through the gate, but not Marston? It's hardly surprising that the nature of politics clears a path more readily for the establishment auteur rather than the up-and-comer, but it doesn't help when the Oscars process colludes. As Marston put it to Variety: "I think there's a problem with the system when Hollywood claims to know better than the submitting country whether a film belongs to them."
The Academy seemed to be championing such overlooked and difficult cases when it added an executive committee to the foreign-language selection process in 2007, to "rescue" three films from the longlist (one of this year's final nominees, broad-shouldered Belgian thriller Bullhead, was rumoured to have made it in this way). But that's a mere Band-Aid when there are so many other anomalies and ambiguities in play, and Oscar's criteria are so muddy. So Marston's Albanian isn't up to scratch, but The Artist is unquestionably embraced to the American breast, despite the fact that the stars, creative team and arguably the refining eye on New World glamour are all very French? Only two (spoken) words qualify The Artist as a film in the English language; as with Slumdog, Hollywood seems quick to claim co-productions (The Artist had Warner's involvement) as its own when it thinks it's got a winner in hand.
My dream fix for the Oscars generally would be to remove them completely from American soil (perhaps having them roaming Olympics-style), and open up all categories to English-language and non-English-language candidates alike. But that's about as likely as giving Osama bin Laden a posthumous Purple Heart. Within the present framework, the only other solution I can think of is scrapping the country-submissions route – to promote more co-productions and avoid flag-waving about who is more "Albanian", or whatever – then widening the final nominees list, as with the best picture award. In an ideal world, that would focus minds on panning the great stream of global cinema for the real gold – but it probably risks putting even more power in the hands of the people who thought 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days wasn't quite good enough. Some experts, like Hitfix's Guy Lodge, think the whole farrago may be as good as it's ever going to be.
There's something passive-aggressive in the degree of the Academy's imprecision here, and in general the dodgy largesse to "world cinema" (as if the US variety is somehow separate). The true purpose of the Oscars is being Hollywood's hand-mirror, and there's a reason foreign-language films are very rarely nominated for best picture, let alone win it. But, as The Artist's crucial two words tell us, what has Hollywood (and America) always been, but a coalition, and a coagulation, of the foreign?
