Far be it for us to call the Oscar voters stupid, but their long list for Best Foreign Language film is pretty stupid. For their nine films, which will then be whittled to five, the Academy has chosen:
The Counterfeiters
The Year My Parents Went on Vacation
Days of Darkness
Beaufort
The Unknown Woman
Mongol
Katyn
12
The Trap
We won't claim to have seen all of that list, or even most of it, but we can say that The Counterfeiters is the best we're familiar with and that was a very good film, but not a great one. It certainly wasn't as great as France's entry, the quite wonderful, funny and intelligent animated movie Persepolis. It wasn't as great as the spectacularly acted and beautifully balanced horror The Orphanage, from Mexico. It wasn't as great as the harrowing 4 Weeks, 3 Months & 2 Days from Romania. It's not even as good as Lust, Caution, which wasn't eligible for the list due to apparently not being sufficiently Taiwanese. When the list doesn't even include four of the best foreign language films of the year, then what the hell is the point?
This list is embarrassing.