Cute Li'l Guys ...

Beyond the Multiplex

The nominees for best foreign language film and best documentary feature are ... a quirky mixed bag. And we handicap them all for you here.

By Andrew O'Hehir
Salon

Mar. 02, 2006 | This year's foreign-language Oscar category is dominated, at least in terms of media coverage, by a late-blooming controversy over a film most Academy members undoubtedly haven't seen. Meanwhile, the documentary feature category is widely seen as a foregone conclusion, given the immense popularity of a film about flightless Antarctic waterfowl that was proclaimed as an example of Christian family values by someone who probably hadn't seen it.

Anybody who thinks these events are extraordinary hasn't been paying attention. The Hollywood establishment's efforts to honor documentaries and foreign films, while undeniably well-meaning, have developed an increasingly buffoonish character over the years. For one thing, there's a kind of taxonomic confusion involved: It's a little like asking a Major League Baseball umpire to officiate a championship chess match, or asking those two sheepherdin' cowpokes from "Brokeback Mountain" to collect botanical specimens.

It's easy to make fun of Academy voters as geriatric, aesthetically unadventurous and susceptible to a certain variety of "message movie." But beneath that partially accurate stereotype lies the fact that America's mainstream film industry is permanently and totally committed to a certain vision of what movies are: large-scale entertainments, whether didactic or romantic or comic or some combination thereof, designed to seduce and manipulate a broad popular audience. There's still a lingering awareness that other possible models exist, but when awards time rolls around, all those possibilities get rolled into two qualities: pretty and earnest.

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