With 2022’s Oscar nominees already announced, it’s becoming clear that this year’s Academy Awards will be one of the most bland awards shows in recent memory. Passing over inspired and entertaining films like Michael Sarnoski’s Pig and Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch, the nominations for best picture instead consist of cliche, pandering fare such as Don’t Look Up, Belfast, and The Power of the Dog.
The root problem with this lineup of mediocre movies is that it’s largely exclusive to Hollywood releases in a year when movie production stagnated. With the exception of Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car, all the nominees are American films from American companies.
Despite the slow year for movies in the States, plenty of good foreign films were released at film festivals or quietly made their way unto streaming. François Ozon’s Summer of 85, Roy Andersson’s About Endlessness, and Prano Bailey-Bond’s Censor were some of the most well-made, interesting films I saw last year.
With Bong Joon-ho’s Oscar win in 2020, some were hopeful that the Academy would start to give more attention to overseas cinema, but the opposite seems to be true.
While it’s easy to dismiss the Oscars as archaic nepotism, it’s hard to ignore the fact that the Academy still has an important role in how film companies market and (more importantly) distribute their films. Aside from film festivals, many critically acclaimed films from last year were rendered almost completely inaccessible to wider audiences.
Quentin Dupieux’s Keep an Eye Out and Céline Sciamma’s Petite Maman were highly praised by critics and film festival attendees, but they were almost completely absent from streaming and theaters. With the difficulty that comes with attending these festivals (especially in a pandemic), it’s unfortunate that the film’s distributors couldn’t make these films more accessible through streaming.
With more incentive to snag Academy Awards or other similar accolades, there’s a good chance that non-US film distributors could step up their game in releasing films overseas. With directors like Park Chan-wook and Takshii Miike working on upcoming films, I’m hoping that studios and companies will start making these great films more accessible in the future.
There have been efforts to create streaming platforms that aim to cater more towards cinephile tastes such as Mubi and The Criterion Channel. However, these services usually only provide arthouse films and ignore the highly-entertaining genre films released overseas.
While the decision of how to distribute foreign films ultimately lies in the hands of foreign companies, American companies can also help. Streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime have an untapped goldmine of films to put their name on and offer up for award consideration.
There’s no doubt that the state of American films is stagnant and often unoriginal. But to those who complain that “there are no good movies anymore”, I urge you to check out the sparse but diverse number of foreign films that are actually distributed in the US.
More than award shows or advertisements, word-of-mouth marketing can often turn a previously unknown film into a success. Everybody wins when great films get the attention they deserve.
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