A record 71 countries, including first-time entrant Kenya, have submitted films for consideration in the Foreign Language Film category for the 85th Academy Awards®. Not joining the list this year is Iran which is boycotting this year's Oscars because of fall out from the anti-Islam video Innocence of Muslims. Last year, Iranian director Asghar Farhadi won the Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language film for A Separation, a first for a filmmaker from that country. The list of contenders follows:
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For the 14th consecutive year, the folks at Time Magazine have once again passed me over when considering their annual roster of the world's 100 Most Influential People. Heretics! So be it — even an incomplete list is worth visiting judgment upon. Let's check out (and rank, naturally) the film personalities included this year. And to my publicist: You're fired!
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The champagne's been tippled, the winners are all celebrating, and somewhere Uggie's getting a LOT of sausages. So let's relive the highlights of the 2012 Academy Awards show! Click through for Movieline's gallery and name your favorite moment from the big night. Was it Best Supporting Actress Octavia Spencer's emotional acceptance speech? Or Descendants co-scripter Jim Rash's impromptu Angelina Jolie impersonation? Those bits and more in vivid photographic detail after the jump!
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The filmmaking in Iranian director Asghar Farhadi's A Separation is so spare and unfussy that, save for the occasional camera jiggle, you're barely aware of the filmmaking at all. This is a drama about two families -- one deeply religious, one not -- who clash over an escalating series of misunderstandings, and the emotion Farhadi teases out of this increasingly complex situation are unvarnished but restrained. Nothing earth-shattering happens in A Separation, but the straightforwardness of this view of a disintegrating marriage, set in the context of complicated cultural and religious morés, is dramatic by itself.
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