Oscars 2018 Category Breakdown: Best Foreign Language Film

So what we do here each year as a warm up for the Oscars is, I break down each of the 24 categories. The idea is to both familiarize everyone with the category and its history. I look at what the major trends are throughout the past bunch of years, how the precursors tend to go, whether they matter or not, that sort of stuff. I look at how the category came to be this year, and just anything else that seems totally pertinent about it. Then I rank each of the nominees and tell you what their likelihood (at this particular moment in time) of winning is.

This is all prelude to my giant Oscar ballot that I’m gonna give you. But I figure, if you have these as the warmup, it’s not as intimidating. You’ll have seen a lot of the pertinent trends here and we’ll all be able to reference these as a sort of cheat sheet. Plus it shows you where my head is at for how I think each of the categories are gonna go, and you can see me working my way up to all the bad decisions I usually make while guessing. Pretty much, with this, you’ll have a pretty good idea of how the category is gonna turn out.

Today is Best Foreign Language Film, a category that’s either more locked than we’ve ever seen, or we’re just gonna get it all wrong, knowing exactly what’s gonna win instead.

Nothing much to say here. Generally you just kinda know what’s gonna win when you look at it. Precursors are generally meaningless.

Best Foreign Language Film

Capernaum

Cold War

Never Look Away

Roma

Shoplifters

So I expected four of these. Wasn’t sure they’d come in, but you pretty much knew Rom and Cold War were gonna come in. You knew they were gonna get other nominations. I figured Cold War would stop at Screenplay and wouldn’t extend to Director, but there we are. Of the rest of the shortlist, Capernaum was pushed pretty hard and felt like the kind of thing they’d like, so that wasn’t so difficult a guess. Shoplifters won Cannes, and seemed like the film they’d go for over Burning (I’m not sure why I felt only one East Asian film would make it on, but that was the feeling. Experience, I guess). The other two, Ayka and Birds of Passage, felt like one that were forced onto the shortlist by the committee. Sometimes those make it on, but this year I did not take into account the possible Cinematography nomination for Never Look Away. Not sure anyone did. And in the end, this category is 3/5 the same category as Best Cinematography. And right there, you can pretty much figure out how this one is gonna go.

Rankings:

5. Shoplifters — Fifth, fourth. Doesn’t matter. This doesn’t have a shot. It could have threaded its way to maybe third choice, but with the top dogs in this one I can’t see this having any kind of legs to make it all the way through to a win. Remember, this is an open vote. So the majority of the people voting in this category will have had to 1) seen all the nominees, and 2) decided this was the best film in the category. Tough call to make when three other films have multiple nominations and one of them is the favorite for Best Picture.

4. Capernaum — See everything I wrote for Capernaum? Just repeat that for this one. This one only has the benefit of having a screener be sent out earlier on in the race. So at least people are aware of it a bit more than Shoplifters. That’s the only reason it’s fourth. Otherwise, can’t really see this one being much of a factor in the race.

3. Never Look Away — From “didn’t even think it would be nominated” to third. Not bad. But a second nomination means even if people bothered to watch it before, some might now because, “Well, it’s on another category too, I might as well.” That’s still not gonna amount to much. Especially when there’s another film they’re already gonna be doing that for. And that has word of mouth and isn’t three hours long and about an artist. The fact that this is third shows you just how far the distance is between the top choices and the lesser choices in this category. This has no chance at this. (And yes, I say that knowing his other film won this category over a huge favorite that won in other categories. That one was at least very much an acclaimed movie, and not a three hour movie about an artist that most people were pretty “meh” on.)

2. Cold War — It’s nominated for Cinematography and Director and is still a second choice. Here’s the deal — we all know it’s the second choice, and we can’t vote for it here because this category seems so fucking obvious that it’s almost like throwing your vote away if you take this. It can still win. I will say that. But you can’t take it. And I’ll explain why now…

1. Roma — This movie is probably gonna WIN BEST PICTURE. The first time that’s ever happened in the history of the Oscars. It has ten nominations. It will win Best Director. Cold War is nominated for Director — this is gonna win Director. And it’ll probably win Cinematography too. Remember the years with A Separation and Amour? They got nominated in the big categories and Foreign Language Film was a given. What do you call this, then? This should be the absolute biggest lock of the night. And yet, there’s that weird thing where… this situation has never happened before. You’ve never had a Foreign Language Film up for Best Picture that actually won it before. Usually they just win this and that’s it. So now you have a situation where it could win both. Does that mean they might just vote for Cold War because they already gave Roma its award? Or is it just the best film and the best film gets the vote? Or are they going away for it in Picture and thinking this is the consolation prize? I have no goddamn clue. Either this is the biggest lock of the night, or it’s 50/50 and it could lose. We’ll figure out how the voting goes later (even though there’s really only one choice). For now, there’s no way you can make any argument that says this isn’t the top contender in this category.

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