Tuesday, February 14, 2017

Oscar Predictions: Best Foreign Film

The Oscars are coming up yet again. The guilds, Globes, BAFTAs, and critics have all made their picks. Now it's my turn to figure out what it all means with my multi-part Oscar predictions.
I'm going to go through each of the Oscar categories, tell you what has been nominated and won elsewhere, and order the nominee from who I think is most to least likely to win on Oscar night. That doesn't mean I'll be right, but it does mean I'll be informed. Wish me luck.

Previously:
Oscar Nomination Thoughts
Introduction & Documentary Feature

Glossary:
BAFTA - British Academy of Film and Television Arts Awards
Golden Globe - Presented by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association  Award

The Foreign film category is tough, partly because I've rarely seen more than one of the nominees. That's a problem, because there aren't many precursor awards of note.
The BAFTA award is very unreliable because their idea of foreign is different than in the U.S. Very often, an Oscar nominee one year isn't eligible until the next year by the BAFTAs. The last two years, the BAFTA winner was from the previous year's Oscar pool. The hard numbers are that they've only even nominated the Oscar winner on the right year 10 of the last 20 years. They've only called the winner 5 times in those two decades.
You'd think the Golden Globes would be better at this, given than they are handed out by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. And they are better than the BAFTAs. They've called 10 of the last 20 winners of the Oscar and at least nominated the Oscar winner 14 times over that span. They are on quite a hot streak right now, calling 4 of the last 5 winners.

Toni Erdmann
BAFTA - Foreign Language Film - Nominee
Golden Globe - Foreign Film - Nominee
Well, the Globe Winner, Elle, wasn't nominated for the Oscar and the BAFTA winner, Son of Saul, won last year's Oscar. In lieu of a win, I'll go with nominations. Toni Erdmann is the only nominee recognized this year by both the Globes and BAFTAs. Also, I looked to Metacritic. Normally, that's an awful idea for this. Oscars go to agreeable films more than critically adored films. Metacritic is helpful for this Oscar though*. I looked back a few years and only very highly rated nominees on Metacritic won the Oscar. Not always the highest rated, but highly rated. Since 2011, the lowest rated winner was The Great Beauty (86). That immediately narrows the field down to two movies this year, and Toni Erdmann (94) is easily the highest rated. This isn't perfect either, because I don't know what the ratings looked like before the Oscars in past years. Perhaps the winners get a boost after the fact. It's still hard to call anything else the front runner though.

*For the record, I looked into RottenTomatoes, but those ratings are too forgiving to pull anything from them.

The Salesman
Golden Globe - Foreign Film - Nominee
It's the only other movie with a precursor nomination, it's from the director of previous winner The Separation, and it barely meets the 86 rating threshold I noticed on Metacritic.

A Man Called Ove
I've heard people call this the front runner for the category. I don't see it. It has no precursor nominations and at 69, it's the lowest rated nominee on Metacritic since Kon-Tiki in 2012. Granted, I haven't seen any of these movies, so I could be missing something.

Land of Mine
We are no longer in the days of WWII = Oscar.

Tanna
I know the least about this of any of the nominees and have no reason to think anyone else will vote for it.

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