Parasite blazed a trail that ought to have been trod sooner…
The 2020 Oscars featured the groundbreaking success of Bong Joon-Ho’s movie Parasite, marking the first time that the winner of Best International Feature Film also won Best Picture.
Since the Academy began recognising foreign-language films in the 1950s, the winner of the international category has only been concurrently nominated for Best Picture six times – that’s six times out of 70!
It seems clear that Parasite‘s milestone ought to have been reached long ago, perhaps many times over – and might have prevailed were it not for the “one-inch barrier”, as Joon-ho refers to subtitles.
So, to redress this slight upon the international filmmaking community, International Oscar Showdown compares each year’s best film with its best foreign-language film peer to identify which ones unjustly lost out.
Current score:
Hollywood 7 – 11 International
Last updated: 09/05/2021
2002 – A Beautiful Mind vs No Man’s Land
2002 had one film about a man’s madness imagining a war, and another about a war filled with madness. Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind is a biopic with a twist, and tells the story of John Forbes Nash Jr, the father of game theory, and his struggles with mental illness.
The foreign-language film is a tragicomic parable of the Bosnian War, that spends half its time being absurd, and half deeply chilling. Trapped between enemy lines, a Bosniak and a Serb try to find a way to survive while a third soldier lies on a jumping mine that will kill them all if he moves.
Two very good movies in this edition – neither perfect, but certainly entertaining and a little different.
Click here to find out which took home the Oscar Showdown trophy…
2003 – Chicago vs Nowhere In Africa
Chicago was the first musical to win Best Picture for 34 years, and is a far cry from the singalong fare of the 1960s. This tale of showbiz and sham trials stays true to its Broadway roots by grounding all the musical numbers to a stage. If you like musicals, this is all ham, glam, thank you ma’am.
On the other end of the tone spectrum is Germany’s Nowhere In Africa, an adaptation of Stefanie Zweig’s autobiography of the same name. This tale of the German Jewish diaspora is a love letter to Kenya, where Zweig’s family found refuge during World War 2. With interesting racial commentary, compelling drama, and abundant affection for the people of Kenya, it’s a worthy winner of the foreign-language award – but does it do enough to steal Chicago’s spotlight?
Find out which was the better film here!…
2004 – The Lord Of The Rings: The Return Of The King vs The Barbarian Invasions
2004 broke a lot of records for the Academy. For a start, Peter Jackson’s culmination of the epic Tolkien trilogy won the largest clean sweep in Oscars history, winning all 11 of its nominated categories. More astonishingly, however, was the fact that The Lord Of The Rings: The Return Of The King still holds the record for the most instances of the word “the” in a movie title.
This lumbering behemoth of a film should have been up against the International Feature Film winner that year, The Barbarian Invasions, from Canada. Another record: the movie was the first and only sequel to win the foreign-language category.
Lots of barbarians invading – whether literally or metaphorically – but which was the better film?
Find out who won the 2004 showdown here…
2005 – Million Dollar Baby vs The Sea Inside
In arguably the starkest example of movie synchronicity in this series, Million Dollar Baby and The Sea Inside both concern euthanasia – though for Clint Eastwood’s boxing film it only informs the final act, while Spanish film The Sea Inside is about paraplegic Ramón Sampedro’s real-life thirty-year campaign to legalise euthanasia and end his life.
Javier Bardem plays Ramón in The Sea Inside and is the film’s shining light, carrying the subtle script with unconquerable charm. On the other hand, Million Dollar Baby‘s script – penned by Oscar-winning hack Paul Haggis, he of Crash shame – lacks any nuance at all, and slaps cynical caricatures into the mix to cheaply manipulate the audience. It is remarkable how effective the direction and performances from Swank, Eastwood and Freeman are to make it such an engaging film.
Put your curiosity out of its misery and see who won here…
2006 – Crash vs Tsotsi
Crash is widely considered the worst Best Picture winner of all time, with its tone-deaf tackling of race relations, a hackneyed script that relies on subverting expectations by further entrenching stereotypes, and its pandering absolution of white guilt. Trite, sanctimonious and manipulative, Crash makes you want to peal your skin off (whatever colour it might be).
So, with the bar set so low only Donald Trump could ooze under it, can South African drama Tsotsi prevail? Set in the slums outside Johannesburg, the film depicts an impoverished hoodlum – who beats his friends and torments disabled beggars at gunpoint – as he meanders towards an unlikely redemption sparked by an encounter with a baby.
Did Tsotsi do the bare minimum to beat Crash? Find out here…
2007 – The Departed vs The Lives Of Others
Sometimes the stars align for an International Oscar Showdown, with two films concerned with very similar themes. In 2007, it was identity, secrecy and clandestine operations that unified the two films: Martin Scorsese’s The Departed and Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives Of Others.
The two films couldn’t be further apart in terms of tone, though. The Departed is a vulgar, plot-heavy cops and robbers caper full of masochistic machismo and alpha-male bantz, while The Lives Of Others is a sombre exploration of the damage the Stasi inflicted upon the people they surveilled during the Communist regime in East Germany.
See which box of secrets contained the best treats…
2008 – No Country For Old Men vs The Counterfeiters
The Coen Brothers won their first Best Picture Oscar with their humourless grimdark remake of Raising Arizona – and I’m only slightly joking. No Country For Old Men features an astonishingly menacing performance from Javier Bardem, and a perpetually suspenseful game of cat and mouse.
Against it was another first – The Counterfeiters was and remains Austria’s only win for Best Foreign-Language Film. Loosely based on true events, the film concerns a man arrested in Nazi Germany for forging ID documents, sent to a concentration camp, and then forced to help the Nazis in their bid to destabilise enemy economies by flooding them with fake currency – one of the finest prison dramas I’ve seen.
Check out which of these two great monies won the Showdown…
2009 – Slumdog Millionaire vs Departures
Winning eight awards on the night, Slumdog Millionaire was one of the most successful movies in Oscars history. Teeming with Indian talent, culture and source material, it’s also the most recognition Bollywood has ever garnered from the Academy, after decades of disappointment attempting to break into the Best Foreign-Language Film category.
Against it is Japanese film Departures, a sweet and solemn comedy-drama about death, shame, pride and respect. With a masterfully handled tone somewhere between fish-out-of-water high-jinx and a sombre reflection of grief, the movie has you laughing one moment and regretting it the next.
See which of these movies won the Showdown here…
2010 – The Hurt Locker vs The Secret In Their Eyes
The Hurt Locker was a hit among audiences and critics alike, blending nail-biting suspense and gritty action with a troubled heroism that drove the plot. And its director, Kathryn Bigelow, became the first woman (and lamentably only woman as of 2020) to win Best Director. But its message of patriotism is a muddled one, and Iraq War veterans were displeased with the unprofessionalism of its protagonist in a film that purported to be as realistic as possible.
Up against it should have been The Secret In Their Eyes, an Argentinian crime thriller based predominantly in the 1970s during the rise of President Isabel Perón and the ensuing Dirty War, which saw tens of thousands of left-leaning activists and civilians arrested and killed. Part judicial procedure movie, part romantic melodrama, part political allegory, the film became one of Argentina’s most successful movies ever.
Read the reviews and see which should have won Best Picture…
2011 – The King’s Speech vs In A Better World
Cynics will suggest the Academy played it safe when awarding The King’s Speech with Best Picture – it features British acting stalwarts playing British royalty, an unlikely underdog, and a backdrop of looming war with Nazi Germany. It doesn’t ask too much of its audience, but nor does it evoke much emotion – it’s just a good film, with a fascinating true story.
On the other end of the spectrum is the entirely fictional melodrama In A Better World, a Danish film about violence and pacifism, and how we teach the innocent to reject confrontation whenever possible. Set mostly in Denmark, the film also follows one of its main characters to an African aid camp, where the theme of revenge is explored to within an inch of its life. It’s a belting drama, but is it too contrived to win the showdown for the international filmmakers?
Find out which film was superior here…
2012 – The Artist vs A Separation
For the sake of the series, we’ll consider The Artist an English-language film, despite it only including a dozen words of spoken dialogue and having been produced by French filmmakers. The pastiche of silent cinema was lauded by critics and was practically a shoe-in for Best Picture in 2012, which isn’t too surprising considering it glorifies Hollywood(land) with palpable admiration.
Up against it in 2012’s International Oscar Showdown was Iranian film A Separation – the first film from Iran to win Best Foreign-Language Film. Its director, Asghar Farhadi, would go on to win again for Iran in 2017, with The Salesman, and both pieces portray a complex drama in religiously conservative Iran in which no single character is evil or entirely at fault. They are ethical muddles, and rich with tension – a remarkable achievement considering the nation’s overbearing censorship laws, which have landed many an Iranian filmmaker in jail.
Read the reviews and see who won here…
2013 – Argo vs Amour
Hollywood picked Hollywood-saves-the-day for its Best Picture award in 2013. Argo was Ben Affleck’s crack at a lofty thriller, in which a fake movie production is put on by the CIA to extricate six stranded Americans in the Canadian embassy in Tehran. One of the more forgettable Best Picture winners of the last few decades, it has its good moments, and its uninspiring ones, but did it do enough to beat its Foreign-Language peer?
Up against it was French film Amour, one of the few international films to get a nomination for the top gong. This heartbreaking drama sees a woman suffer a stroke while her partner of 50 years struggles to cope with her deteriorating health. It’s a small film, shot almost entirely in one apartment, but the characters are so brilliantly portrayed, and their chemistry effortlessly believable that the two-hour running time is a surprise rather than a chore.
Read the reviews of Argo and Amour, and see who should’ve won, here…
2014 – 12 Years A Slave vs The Great Beauty
The Academy ended its three-year run of handing Best Picture to films that featured acting as a heroic pursuit (only to reinstate the trend the following year for Birdman) and gave it to a gruelling depiction of slavery in pre-civil-war America, 12 Years A Slave. Its director, Steve McQueen, presented a harrowing indictment of a cruel system, but fell short of casting slave owners as universally evil, which we might have found more comfortable to watch. The result is a gruelling two hours of torture and dashed hopes.
On the other end of the spectrum, Best Foreign Language Film was awarded to The Great Beauty, an Italian movie about a hedonistic art critic, who spends most of his time at parties, preposterous art installations and strip clubs, as he mourns the loss of his youthful creativity. It is a strange film, beautifully shot if perplexingly avant-garde, with a charismatic lead playing second fiddle to the film’s most overbearing character of all: Rome itself.
Find out which film deserved the Best Picture award here…
2015 – Birdman vs Ida
After its brief foray with the more heady stuff in 2014, the Academy returned to form with Birdman, a film by actors, for actors, about actors. With an underlying concept that pits meaningful art against blockbuster thrills, the film is as self-deprecating as it is wildly self-absorbed, but delivered with perfect comic timing and excellent performances.
Almost in direct juxtaposition was Foreign Language Film winner Ida, a black and white movie from Poland exploring the fallout of the Holocaust. Filmed in 4:3 aspect ratio, with extremely stylised cinematography that persistently emphasises negative space, Ida is a slow-paced drama about a nun who discovers she had Jewish parents, murdered by Polish peasants at the behest of the Nazis. Featuring a supporting character who is more interesting than the lead, Ida is a poignant little film.
Find out which won the showdown here…
2016 – Spotlight vs Son of Saul
The most dauntingly serious match-up of the International Oscar Showdown was undoubtedly 2016’s, in which the sexual predation of children among Catholic priests was up against the single most horrifying depiction of the Holocaust I’ve ever witnessed.
Spotlight was an interesting pick for Best Picture – it’s a methodical, journalistic film with all the high stakes well in the past as the team of investigative reporters slowly uncover the truth. The presiding emotion is one of disbelief that the church covered up so many systemic abuses over decades without the public grasping the prevalence of these crimes. Mark Ruffalo has a good stab at an Oscar delivery (which reminded me of Tyler Durden lying to the police about how much he loved his condo – “I’d like to thank the Academy”), but the film is quite dry in comparison to previous winners.
Meanwhile, Son of Saul takes place in Auschwitz… The film follows Saul, a Hungarian Jew who works in the gas chambers as a “Sonderkommando”, a class of prisoner forced to usher the camp’s victims to their doom, strip them, collect their belongings and, once exterminated, clear the bodies. With the camera tight to Saul as he works, all the horrors of genocide are blurred in the background – and all the more horrifying for their bokeh omnipresence. A deeply affecting experience.
Find out which of these tales of systemic abuse was superior…
2017 – Moonlight vs The Salesman
2018’s International Oscar Showdown featured one of the rare, and perhaps the finest, LGBT movies to win Best Picture: Moonlight. Told in three chapters that chronicle the coming of age of a black boy growing up in poverty, Moonlight is a study of repressed sexuality, rampant homophobia, and performative identity. But most of all, it is about yearning to be loved.
Meanwhile, Asghar Farhadi won Best Foreign-Language Film for the second time for Iran in 2017 with The Salesman, a powerful tale of masculine frustration, undermined revenge and societal insouciance that exposes Iran’s conservative culture. When Emad’s wife Rana is raped, the husband attempts to hunt down the perpetrator and exact the most heinous revenge upon them that he can conceivably and legally inflict — namely: familial shame. This is a far cry from American revenge movies.
See who won the showdown here…
2018 – The Shape of Water vs A Fantastic Woman
Once in a while the two films in a Showdown carry the same theme, and in 2018 it was forbidden love – though two very different takes on that idea. Taking Best Picture was Guillermo del Toro’s atomic-age sci-fi The Shape of Water, an homage to Beauty & The Beast with a Bioshock-aesthetic. It’s a visually glorious film, from the set design to the costumes, with some terrific performances. You just need to get past the monstrous fish sex…
Against it was A Fantastic Woman, a Chilean tale of transphobia from Sebastián Lelio. The movie is about Marina, a trans waitress and nightclub singer whose much older boyfriend suffers an aneurysm in the night and does not recover. Dealing with a probing murder investigation and the prejudices of her lover’s bereaved family, Marina endures psychological and physical abuse as she processes her own grief. It’s a gripping story, and a worthy winner, but should it have beaten del Toro’s gothic horror?
2019 – Green Book vs Roma
International Oscar Showdown began in reverse chronological order to find Foreign-Language Film winners that were superior to their (predominantly American) Best Picture peers, and Roma provided immediate vindication in that endeavour. Indeed, there stretches such a gulf of class between it and Green Book it is comical to compare them at all.
Inescapably compared to ridiculed Oscar alumni Driving Miss Daisy, Green Book has the same racial tension but with the roles reversed, as a white working-class person forms an unlikely bond driving a rich black person around the Deep South. Unfortunately, the film suffers from underdeveloped sub-plots, unearned character arcs and a deeply confused commentary on class in America. The best thing about the film is picking it apart.
And then there’s Roma – Alfonso Cuarón’s labour of love devoted to the nanny who brought him up as a child in the suburbs of Mexico City. Full of remarkable cinematography, brimming with love and loss, and cast with actors of remarkable authenticity, Roma is a modern masterpiece.
International Oscar Showdown 