Predicting the nominees: Oscar announcement set for Tuesday

The Oscars will be bigger than ever this year, as the field for best picture expands from five to 10 nominees. That means fan favorites like “Avatar,” “Star Trek” and “The Hangover” just might make the cut, whereas in past years they would not.

It’s all part of a plan to boost ratings for an Oscar telecast that hit a nadir last year, when not one of the indie-minded best picture nominees crossed the magical $100 million level at the box office. (“Slumdog Millionaire” did eventually achieve that mark after winning best picture.)

That won’t be a problem this year with “Avatar,” history’s biggest money earner, leading the charge. Good thing, too, because without the interest that James Cameron’s mega-blockbuster has created, there would be nothing interesting at all about this year’s ceremony.

Just look at the all-important acting categories, where Jeff Bridges, Mo’Nique and newcomer Christoph Waltz rank as prohibitive favorites to take home the little gold guy.

Only in the best actress category – where the slight favorite, Sandra Bullock, faces a stiff challenge from Meryl Streep – is there a hint of drama.

Still, if you’re like me (and, yes, I’m aware there are fewer and fewer of us), you won’t be able to resist the Hollywood glitz, politics and backstabbing that are so very much a part of the awards.

But who will be nominated? The answer comes Tuesday morning, when all names will be revealed. But why wait until then when my crystal ball is so clear? Well, maybe not perfectly clear, but pretty clear.

So without further ado, let me introduce my predictions on whose names will be called out Tuesday, beginning with:

Best Supporting Actress

The contenders: Vera Farmiga, “Up in the Air”; Anna Kendrick, “Up in the Air”; Mo’Nique, “Precious”; Diane Kruger, “Inglourious Basterds”; Betty White, “The Proposal”; Jane Lynch, “Julie & Julia”; Penelope Cruz, “Nine”; Marion Cotillard, “Nine”; Helen Mirren, “The Last Station”; Julianne Moore, “A Single Man.”

Locks: Coming off her wins at the Golden Globes and Screen Actors Guild Awards, Mo’Nique heads into the Oscars as the overwhelming favorite for her haunting portrayal of an angry, abusive mother in “Precious.” She’s a shoo-in, as are “Up in the Air’s” unbeatable tandem of Kendrick and Farmiga.

On the bubble: The remaining two spots are anybody’s guess. But don’t be surprised if voters give a shout-out to the 88-year-old White in tribute to her longevity. The ballot-casters might, however, have a few qualms about honoring someone playing a role as crass as her foul-mouthed granny in “The Proposal.” As for Cruz and Cotillard, they can pretty much figure on watching the Oscars from their couches thanks to “Nine’s” minuscule box office. Which leaves the M&Ms, Moore and Mirren, who I think will fill the remaining spots. Why? Because voters love classy actresses, especially ones with resumes as glowing as theirs.

Best supporting actor

The contenders: Christoph Waltz, “Inglourious Basterds”; Woody Harrelson, “The Messenger”; Stanley Tucci, “The Lovely Bones” or “Julie & Julia”; Christian McKay, “Me and Orson Welles”; Alec Baldwin, “It’s Complicated”; Christopher Plummer, “The Last Station”; Alfred Molina, “An Education”; Colin Farrell, “Crazy Heart”; Peter Capaldi, “In the Loop”; Matt Damon, “Invictus.”

Locks: Like Mo’Nique, the previously unknown Waltz has won every award there is to be won. And that will surely continue for the rest of the awards season. His closest competition – and it’s really not very close – is Harrelson, who gave perhaps the best performance of his career as the hardened Army officer in the criminally underseen “The Messenger.”

On the bubble: Again, the remaining spots are mere window dressing and a chance to acknowledge lifetime achievements. That’s why I think voters will go for Plummer, Molina and Damon. But if it were up to me, those spots would go to Farrell, showing off his lofty singing talents in “Crazy Heart,” and the two unknowns from across the pond, McKay and Capaldi, who were both larger than life in films almost too small to contain their talents.

Best actress

The contenders: Sandra Bullock, “The Blind Side”; Carey Mulligan, “An Education”; Meryl Streep, “Julie & Julia”; Melanie Laurent, “Inglourious Basterds”; Emily Blunt, “The Young Victoria”; Gabourey Sidibe, “Precious”; Ellen Page, “Whip It”; Zooey Deschanel, “(500) Days of Summer”; Amy Adams, “Sunshine Cleaning”; Nisreen Faour, “Amreeka.”

Locks: On the strength of her shocking Golden Globe and SAG wins, Bullock can start picking out her gown and writing her Oscar acceptance speech now. Still, don’t count out Streep, also a Golden Globe winner, who was so amazing as Julia Child that I cannot believe voters – when it comes time to cast their final ballots – will overlook work that was superior to Bullock’s in every way. But, hey, she’s Streep; and sadly too many people now take her greatness for granted.

On the bubble: Among the also-rans, Sidibe is the closest to being a shoo-in for her wrenching portrayal of an abused and neglected teen in “Precious.” As for the fourth spot; I think it will go to Mulligan, although I believe her clout is fading now that voters realize “An Education” wasn’t as great as some critics proclaimed. That leaves one spot for Laurent and Blunt to fight over, with Blunt winning, simply because more voters are familiar with her than with Laurent. If it were up to me, though, it would be Laurent, who was amazing as a French resistance leader in “Basterds.”

Best actor

The contenders: Jeff Bridges, “Crazy Heart”; George Clooney, “Up in the Air”; Jeremy Renner, “The Hurt Locker”; Michael Stuhlbarg, “A Serious Man”; Colin Firth, “A Single Man”; Morgan Freeman, “Invictus”; Matt Damon, “The Informant”; Viggo Mortensen, “The Road”; Michael Fassbender, “Hunger”; Brad Pitt, “Inglourious Basterds”; Nicolas Cage, “Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans.”

Locks: It’s starting to sound like a broken record, but yet again, this is a race that is all but over, with Bridges prevailing. Deservedly so, too, because his drunken, washed-up singer in “Crazy Heart” was the finest work of his career, and no one came close to matching it. Joining him in the front row of the Kodak Theatre on March 7 will be Clooney and Renner, two guys who grew out of the slums of TV into charismatic leading men. They also share one other trait: They both dazzled with their heartfelt portrayals of committed loners who get their jollies from their work: Clooney dismantling people’s lives and Renner dismantling bombs.

On the bubble: Firth, who has never been nominated despite many a fine performance, would seem to finally be in line for some well-deserved kudos for his portrayal of a gay man tormented by grief. The fifth spot is not so certain. At one time, it seemed like Freeman would be a lock for his dead-on depiction of South African leader Nelson Mandela, but those hopes may have faded along with the film’s mediocre box office returns. If he falters, look for the unknown but terrific Stuhlbarg to squeeze in.

Best director

The contenders: James Cameron, “Avatar”; Kathryn Bigelow, “The Hurt Locker”; Jason Reitman, “Up in the Air”; Quentin Tarantino, “Inglourious Basterds”; Lee Daniels, “Precious”; Clint Eastwood, “Invictus”; Lone Scherfig, “An Education”; Joel and Ethan Coen, “A Serious Man”: Nora Ephron, “Julie and Julia”; Marc Webb, “(500) Days of Summer.”

Locks: Although I hated his movie and what it represents (glitz over substance), the smug and narcissistic Cameron is the early favorite to win the Oscar. Hopefully, voters will wise up in the next couple of weeks and give the prize to the person who truly deserves it, Bigelow. And that’s not just because she’s the ex-wife of Cameron, the self-proclaimed King of the World. No, it’s because in her Iraq war drama, she created some of the best, most gut-churning suspense since Hitchcock in his prime. Although they weren’t quite up to her level, Reitman and Tarantino also deserve to be here; because, unlike Cameron, they are directors who know how to tell compelling, unconventional stories that don’t rip off “Dances With Wolves.”

On the bubble: That leaves one open spot, and who gets it is anybody’s guess. About six weeks ago, it looked like it would be Eastwood, but that was before “Invictus” failed to dazzle audiences and critics. Ditto for Rob Marshall for his DOA “Nine.” Daniels would seem the likely choice, given the amazing work he did in coaxing superb performances out of newcomer Sidibe and former Pepsi pitch woman Mo’Nique. He would be my choice, too. But I have a hunch voters will continue to show their love for the quirky Coen brothers and give them the nod.

Best picture

The contenders: “Avatar,” “Inglourious Basterds,” “Up in the Air,” “Up,” “The Messenger,” “A Serious Man,” “A Single Man,” “The Hurt Locker,” “Precious,” “An Education,” “Invictus,” “District 9,” “The Hangover,” “Star Trek,” “In the Loop,” “Coraline,” “Fantastic Mr. Fox.”

Locks: This is the category that has everyone anxious because the field has been expanded from the traditional five to 10. It’s meant to boost TV ratings, which is fine, except it in turn dilutes the strength of the field and opens the door for a movie to win best picture with only minimal support from voters. That means you, “Avatar,” which should win every technical award, as it deserves, but not best director or picture. No, that honor should go to either “Up,” “Up in the Air,” “Inglourious Basterds” or “The Hurt Locker,” all of which are likely nominees.

On the bubble: The other five openings likely will be filled with slightly lesser fare like “Star Trek,” “Distirct 9,” “An Education” and “Precious.” But if there is justice, those spots will go to the smart and sassy “In the Loop,” the ingeniously clever “(500) Days of Summer,” the tremendously well-acted “The Messenger,” the gorgeously animated “Coraline” and either of the year’s two superior documentaries, “The Cove” or “Food, Inc.”

Source:tauntongazette.com/

And the nominees are?

At this point in the awards season, we’ve got a good sense of the major Oscar contenders; the real fun is had in imagining what the surprises will be when the nominees are announced on Tuesday. So I’ve put together a few ideas of my own.

By the way, all that talk about the expanded Best Picture competition means nothing; there may be ten slots at the top, but there are only five nominations for the other categories. Thus, the favourites will distinguish themselves pretty quickly; if a given title didn’t score a Director nomination, it doesn’t have a chance at the top prize.

Avatar will be nominated for Picture, Director and a slew of technical awards, but James Cameron’s script – and all of his actors – will go unacknowledged. Which is sort of what the movie’s all about.


The Hurt Locker will fail to score a Best Director nomination, depriving the media of its Battle of the Exes (Kathryn Bigelow used to be married to James Cameron) and sparking a brief debate over Academy sexism until someone reminds us that Oscar has never had much patience for unconventional, cerebral war movies, as great as they may be. Remember, this is the organization that embraced Platoon and ignored Full Metal Jacket.


Precious: Based On The Novel “Push” By Sapphire will probably not be nominated for Best Picture. Or Best Director. Or much of anything else, beyond nods for Best Adapted Screenplay and Mo’Nique’s stranglehold on Best Supporting Actress. The buzz just isn’t there anymore, having petered out over the long release campaign. An Education and Bright Star face the same challenge: they exploded out of Cannes, but lost momentum almost as soon as they went into commercial release.


Jason Reitman’s Up In The Air will be showered with major nominations – it’ll be up for Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, and acting nominations for George Clooney, Vera Farmiga and Anna Kendrick. And given the Oscar tradition of awarding Best Supporting Actress to the youngest or oldest contender, Kendrick’s likely to be the only nominee with a chance of beating Mo’Nique for the prize.


Pixar’s Up will be the second animated film to score a Best Picture nomination. But the existence of the Best Animated Feature category means no one actually has to support it any further for the top prize.


Meryl Streep will be nominated for Best Actress for Julie & Julia, which will make Sony very happy. Universal, which was chasing a Streep nomination for It’s Complicated, will not be happy.


Jeff Bridges will be nominated for his lead performance in Crazy Heart. In a perfect world, so would Nicolas Cage, for his balls-out turn in The Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans. But it’s not a perfect world.


No one will remember Where The Wild Things Are, either. Or Michael Fassbender in Hunger. Or Arta Dobroschi in Lorna’s Silence.



Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds will land the expected noms – Best Supporting Actor for Christoph Waltz, Best Original Screenplay for QT himself and maybe some production-design prizes. It might even land one of those extra Best Picture slots. But it’s not a serious contender, and the Weinsteins know it … which is why they blew this year’s promotional budget on Nine. (Also: Ouch.)


Nine will score two nominations for Best Original Song, even though that means Kate Hudson will appear on the telecast performing the horrible “Cinema Italiano” in a production number even cheesier than the one in the film. The other song, Marion Cotillard’s striptease number “Take It All”, will look classy by comparison.


Composer Marvin Hamlisch will land his first Oscar nomination in 13 years for “The Informant!” And he will lose, because not enough voters will get the joke of his marvellously self-referential score.


Stanley Tucci is competing against himself for a Best Supporting Actor nomination … and his sweet, understated work in Julie & Julia will probably lose out to his eeeeeevil performance in The Lovely Bones, accomplished mostly through a comb-over and wolf-eye contact lenses. Which is a shame; Christoph Waltz seems like a lock to win for Inglourious Basterds, but goodwill for Streep’s performance in Julie & Julia might have spread over to Tucci, were he up for that role instead.


Remember when Paramount was dangling Star Trek as a possible Best Picture contender? Yeah, me too. Now, I’m thinking District 9 has an outside chance at a nomination, and possibly a Cinematography nod as well – if enough voters could stand the squicky aliens and graphic battle sequences, that is.


The Coen brothers will be all but ignored for A Serious Man, their best movie in a very long time. Best Original Screenplay, but that’ll be it. (Go on, voters, prove me wrong, I dare you!)


That ought to get the conversation started. Meet me back here Tuesday morning to discuss the fallout from the actual nominations. Personally, I’m rooting for A Perfect Getaway to make a dark-horse sweep of the acting categories. Viva Steve Zahn!

Farewell, Miramax: Oscar Will Never Be the Same

As Sharon Waxman has pointed out, the Thursday shuttering of Miramax marks the end of an era in independent film, the demise of a company that brought us “the movies that defined the latter part of the 20th century.”

But in the world of awards, the death of Miramax means more than that. Over the past 25 years, no studio has dominated the Oscars the way Miramax did, in ways both good and bad.

Harvey and Bob Weinstein’s company revolutionized awards season, turned Oscar campaigning into a contact sport, infuriated rivals, led to new Academy campaign regulations, caused a change in the Best Picture rules … and, along the way, did a very, very good job of winning Oscar nominations and taking home statuettes.

They landed Oscars for Michael Caine, Daniel Day-Lewis, Quentin Tarantino, Anthony Minghella, Gwyneth Paltrow, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Renee Zellweger, Neil Jordan, Billy Bob Thornton, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, and many more.

Including Roberto Benigni, recipient of what screenwriter William Goldman famously called “the scummiest award in the Academy’s history.”

Miramax pushed the boundaries and reaped the rewards – and if they left disgruntled rivals complaining about their tactics, you’d hardly expect any different when, for instance, an indie company gets as many Oscar nominations as Warner Bros., Universal, 20th Century Fox, Sony and Disney (its parent company) combined, as they did at the 2002 Oscars.

“Miramax has gone at the whole idea of campaigning in a way that just hadn’t been seen before,” said Bruce Davis, the Academy’s executive director, a few years ago. “They see it as a competitive sport, and look for every edge, every angle. And they’re not the only ones responsible, because the others have felt the need to step up and match them.”

In a way, the Weinsteins built their company with awards: landing Oscars for films like “My Left Foot,” “The Crying Game” and “The Piano” gave the company credibility with actors and filmmakers, who saw it as a place that knew how to follow through.

By early 1990s, Miramax had become the most aggressive Oscar campaigner in the game – not only sending out screeners, but hiring consultants and working all aspects of the game. Sometimes they were too aggressive: an overly elaborate package containing the videocassette of “Il Postino” cost them two Oscar tickets when the Academy found it unseemly.

For the 1994 Oscars, the year of Miramax’s “Pulp Fiction,” they won 22 nominations, a dozen more than their new parent company, Disney, and five more than the second-place studio, Paramount. In the Best Supporting Actress and Best Original Screenplay categories, they had four of the five nominees; in Best Director, they had three of the five. (They won in the first two categories, lost in the third.)

Two years later, Miramax won a Best Picture award for “The English Patient,” during a year when four of the five nominees (all but “Jerry Maguire”) were indies, and the prize went to the one that looked least like an indie.

At the 1997 Oscars, the Miramax film “Good Will Hunting” went head-to-head with a James Cameron juggernaut, “Titanic,” and Harvey Weinstein tried his best to play the gutty little underdog: “If Jim Cameron is saying size matters, then we at Miramax are saying less is more,” he told CNN.

The following year, Miramax came out on top in an epic Oscar battle with DreamWorks. The latter studio’s film, Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan,” had been the frontrunner for most of the year, while Miramax positioned its lighter “Shakespeare in Love” as the alternative for those who didn’t feel “Private Ryan” was top-drawer Spielberg.

When writers began pointing out that “Ryan” never quite lived up to the promise of its remarkable opening D-Day sequence, fingers were pointed at Harvey for spreading that angle; when campaign spending reached record levels, DreamWorks chief Jeffrey Katzenberg blamed Harvey.

“There is no question that the extraordinary campaign Miramax has run in support of ‘Shakespeare’ has caused us to do more on behalf of ‘Ryan’ than we had initially planned,” he said to the Los Angeles Times.

After a campaign that was rumored to have cost the two studios as much as $15 million each, “Shakespeare” scored the upset victory. As one of the film’s five credited producers, Harvey Weinstein took the stage and delivered an acceptance speech, whereupon he became the first best-picture winner in years to be played off by the orchestra before he’s finished talking.

Three months later, the Academy’s board of governors passed a new rule that said no more than three producers would be credited on a Best Picture nominee.

Miramax went head-to-head with DreamWorks again the next year, when Weinstein had “The Cider House Rules” and Katzenberg had “American Beauty.” This time DreamWorks won, after the companies spent so much money that host Billy Crystal turned it into a joke, as he introduced a man who’d been given a reward for finding lost Oscar statuettes.

“Willie got $50,000 for finding the 52 Oscars,” he said. “Not a lot of money when you realize that Miramax and DreamWorks are spending millions of dollars just to get one.”

That race required some finessing—and, perhaps, some misreprentation – on the part of Miramax.

“American Beauty,” the frontrunner, was tough stuff, dealing with anomie, voyeurism, pedophilia, homosexuality and other undercurrents running through suburbia.

Source:thewrap.com/

Oscars Try to Navigate Through Babel

THERE was a time when the Academy Award for best foreign-language film reflected the state of world cinema: Fellini films won back-to-back Oscars in the mid 1950s, as did Bergman films in the early ’60s. But the category has come to suggest a peculiar gulf between Academy opinion and the tastes of critics and audiences alike.

Some Oscar-nominated foreign titles from the past decade will leave even committed art-house audiences drawing a blank: “Zelary” from the Czech Republic, “As It Is in Heaven” from Sweden, “Zus & Zo” from the Netherlands. Meanwhile critical favorites and festival hits have often gone unacknowledged; a list of conspicuous omissions might start — but certainly would not end — with “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” “Caché,” “Silent Light,” “Gomorrah,” “The Edge of Heaven,” “Secret Sunshine” and “Volver.”

This incongruity has much to do with the category’s submission and nominating process, which is more byzantine than for any other, involving nominating bodies in various countries and several Academy committees. This year’s nine-film shortlist, announced this month, was whittled down by two committees from 65 submissions; the final five, to be determined by a third committee, will be revealed along with the other Oscar nominations on Tuesday. Mark Johnson, a veteran producer (“The Notebook,” “Ballast,” the “Narnia” films) and chairman of the Academy’s foreign-language committee since 1999, said that he has been striving in recent years to improve a process that, he acknowledged, often left the impression of an out-of-touch voting body. “We’ve attacked some of what I think have been real legitimate problems and criticisms,” he said.

While Mr. Johnson’s efforts have been largely focused on arriving at a more credible group of nominees, they have not streamlined the complex, multistage procedure. At each phase “there are always surprises and disappointments,” said Michael Barker, the co-president of Sony Pictures Classics, which is distributing three of this year’s nine shortlisted films: Michael Haneke’s “White Ribbon” (Germany), Jacques Audiard’s “Prophet” (France) and Juan José Campanella’s “Secret in Their Eyes” (Argentina).

The rule changes have not eliminated controversy. This year some critics pointed to omissions like “Police, Adjective” (from Romania), “Mother” (South Korea) and “I Killed My Mother” (Canada), all of which were the submissions of their respective countries, and films like “The Maid” (Chile) and “Vincere” (Italy), which were not selected in the first place.

Jonathan Sehring, the president of IFC Entertainment, an active distributor of foreign films, called the nominating process “terribly flawed” and singled out for criticism the one-film-per-country rule.

Some countries arrive at their choice by polling an Academy-like professional organization with hundreds or thousands of members; countries with less robust film industries might have more ad-hoc groups, sometimes with as few as a dozen voters. While the system is designed to allow even the smallest of film-producing nations a shot, it also ends up punishing relative powerhouses like France and Italy, which have many more acclaimed releases in a given year than, say, Iceland or the Ivory Coast, but must pick only one.

The emphasis on national origin means that international co-productions (like “The Motorcycle Diaries”) tend to fall by the wayside. Until recently the Academy also insisted that the foreign language match the foreign country; for instance, Mr. Haneke’s “Caché,” a French-language film by an Austrian director, was deemed ineligible. And two years ago “The Band’s Visit” was disqualified from being Israel’s official candidate because too much of the movie was in English.

At the national level the decisions are often tangled in internal politics. “Some countries approach the process in terms of ‘Whose turn is it?’ ” Mr. Sehring said, adding that personal agendas can come into play. Some questioned Italy’s decision this year to submit Giuseppe Tornatore’s big-budget period epic “Baaria” over Marco Bellochio’s “Vincere,” a film about Mussolini’s secret lover that has been received with greater enthusiasm at festivals (and is being released in the United States by IFC this year); it has not gone unnoticed that one financial backer of “Baaria” is Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister.

Voting bodies are apt to consider, sometimes above all other factors, how well a film might travel. Mr. Barker of Sony recalled being at an Academy-related panel at a film festival in Norway and hearing the question come up in the bluntest terms: “Do we pick what we think is the best film, or do we pick what we think the Americans will vote for?” France has fielded suspiciously treacly fare like “Merry Christmas” and “The Chorus,” ignoring work by better-known auteurs like Arnaud Desplechin and Olivier Assayas.

The record in the foreign-language category suggests a weakness for stodgy, conservative films, and the Academy members who vote in the category are usually older.

Gary Palmucci, general manager of Kino International, attended a few Academy screenings two years ago, when one of his films, “Beaufort” (Israel), was up for an Oscar. With a few exceptions, he said, “it looked like everybody was over 65.” (Kino has another Israeli film on this year’s shortlist: “Ajami,” which opens in New York this week.)

This demographic quirk can be partly chalked up to the rigors of the nomination process. Every year the submitted movies are divided into four groups; an Academy member who wishes to participate in the nominations must see at least 80 percent of the films in one group (which usually works out to more than a dozen films). All films must be seen in theaters; since most of the titles are not in commercial release, that usually means attending special Academy screenings.

“The people who have that kind of time are often the older members who are retired,” Mr. Johnson said. And they tend to favor what Mr. Palmucci described as “a more meat-and-potatoes kind of film.” Mr. Sehring noted that movies with relatively challenging subject matter (“4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” about abortion in Ceausescu-era Romania) or form (the hand-drawn animation of “Persepolis”) have often been overlooked.

Such criticisms are hardly new, but they intensified two years ago when the Academy snubbed “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” a Palme d’Or winner at Cannes. Mr. Johnson responded by introducing an intermediate step in the nominating process to try to create a safeguard measure against glaring oversights.

“I don’t mean to be critical of the general committee because it’s older,” Mr. Johnson said, “but I wanted to make the selection process reflect more the Academy at large.”

Instead of entrusting the general membership with arriving at the nine-film shortlist, the Academy now takes the top six choices of the voting members (an average of 300 every year, Mr. Johnson said); the remaining three are wild-card selections by an executive committee appointed by Mr. Johnson, including the director Curtis Hanson, the cinematographer Janusz Kaminski and the German director Florian Henckel von Donnersmark, whose film “The Lives of Others” was a foreign-language winner. (The shortlist is narrowed to the final five by yet another committee’s members, who watch all nine films in a three-day period.)

Last year — the first time the shortlist was determined by two separate committees — the eventual nominees included well-reviewed art-house hits like “The Class” and “Waltz With Bashir” as well as an under-the-radar critical favorite, “Revanche.” This year’s list includes the Berlin festival’s top prizewinner, “The Milk of Sorrow” (Peru), and two Cannes hits, “The White Ribbon” (Germany) and “A Prophet” (France), films that might be too dark or difficult to have made it this far under the old system.

But there is nothing Mr. Johnson can do once the nominees are set and the vote is opened to the entire membership. Last year his rule changes produced the category’s most respectable lineup in some time. But it was the Japanese film “Departures,” which many considered the most conventional and sentimental of the five, that won.

That decision may not stand the test of time, but in a sense it is in keeping with tradition. In 1981, when Mr. Barker and his partner Tom Bernard were at United Artists, they had a foreign-language Oscar frontrunner in François Truffaut’s “Last Metro.” The other prime contender was thought to be Akira Kurosawa’s “Kagemusha.” But the eventual winner was a Russian film, long since forgotten, called “Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears.”

“It was a surprise to us that this could happen,” Mr. Barker said. “But then we realized this kind of thing has been happening for generations.”

Source:nytimes.com/