The Oscars Fixed Best International Feature! Or … Did They?

One of the annoying quirks in the Oscars’ Best International Feature category is that each country had to nominate one movie, which is how you wind up with years wherein a country dares to have more than one good movie come out and has to pick between them. Most recently, France opted for Les Misérables (not that one) over Portrait of a Lady on Fire, to the outcry of many a Letterboxd teen. There has also always been the sticky situation involving dissident films critical of a country’s government or regime: Most countries with strict governments will go out of their way to not nominate a film that observes or decries how people are treated, which is how you wind up with a movie like Seed of the Sacred Fig, an Iranian film, becoming Germany’s submission for Best International Feature. The system has long felt busted and old-fashioned, but a new slate of rules were announced on May 1 that expanded the qualifying rules for the category. Phew! Right?

Well, maybe and also maybe not. In addition to being selected by a country, a film may qualify for Best International Feature by “winning a qualifying award at an international film festival as specified in the International Feature Film Award Qualifying Festival List.” The list of qualifying festivals and categories include: the Berlin International Film Festival’s Golden Bear, the Busan International Film Festival’s Best Film Award, the Cannes Film Festival’s coveted Palme d’Or, the Sundance Film Festival’s World Cinema Grand Jury Prize, the Toronto International Film Festival’s Platform Award, and the Venice International Film Festival’s Golden Lion. So for a movie that wins the Palme but gets snubbed by the nominating country, like Anatomy of a Fall (which was passed over for The Taste of Things, which didn’t even get nominated for an Oscar), there’s still another route. This also means that if one country happens to have a whole slate of fantastic movies, there could be seven nominees all from a single nation. (That doesn’t seem likely, but it would be kind of fun!) It does also mean that film festivals may be more inclined to award dissident and political films in hopes of overriding a country’s decision to overlook a critical movie. That makes the controversy at this past year’s Berlinale, wherein multiple stars, directors, and organizers claimed their festival isn’t meant to be political, look, well, pretty silly. So like all things the Academy does, it could be awesome or a mess (or some combo of the two).

There are a few other updated rules, some mundane and some quite funny, including an amendment to Best Original Song: “For songs submitted as the first new music cue once the end credits begin, the video clip must include the last 15 seconds of the film before the credits begin.” Which is to say: Stop just submitting the credits of your movie! Make people reckon with the random song that comes at the end of the movie by also submitting the end of the movie. I’m imagining this in the context of Miley Cyrus’s song at the end of Avatar: Fire and Ash, but we’ll see what happens with Taylor Swift’s rumored Toy Story 5 song next year.