Kazhes pierakstu burtnīca

Last night the shortlist of 9 films still in run for the 5 nominations for the best foreign language film Academy award were announced. Predictably those did not include either the Latvian or the Lithuanian entries and as a whole the list doesn`t hold too many surprises. Personally I would have preferred the Czech entry - "The Karamazovs" - to be on the list, as I`m quite fond of its director Petr Zelenka`s previous works (but without having seen this new film I can`t guarantee that it is any good, of course).
Being a fanatic of numbers, I simply can`t restrain from providing some facts and figures regarding the foreign language film awards and predictions on the outcome of this year race.
Out of the 9 countries still in the run only one - Turkey hasn`t scored even one nomination before. Meanwhile French films have been at least nominated on 37 previous occasions (plus their entry made it to the shortlist but wasn`t nominated two years ago). Six of the nine contestants have won in previous years - in addition to Turkey only Israel and Mexico haven`t any got any wins.
I`m gonna make a guess of the nominations (an the eventual winner), but that guess will be more based upon emotions than numbers. So I predict that the final five will be:
France, Germany, Sweden, Israel and Mexico, with Germany winning the Award. My motivation to eliminate the other 4 countries goes like this:
- Austria has very slim chances as no country that had won the Award one year got a nomination next year since 1989
- Canada doesn`t have much of a chance as "The Class" will probably have taken the support of the franco-phonic majority, so a second French-language film in the final 5 seems unlikely (the last two times when Canada was nominated, France was not)
- Turkey seems to me to be one of those countries who`s films just don`t get nominated
- Japan, a three-time winner of the award has been quite unpopular with the Academy in the past 25 years, only scoring one nomination since 1982.
Why do I predict the German film to win? More or less it`s done by elimination. The Israeli one if I understand it right, is somewhat similar to "Persepolis" - and it failed miserably (and unexpectedly) last year, without even making it to top 9. "Waltz with Bashir" will probably fare better (maybe the Golden Globe win will help it), but a win seems unlikely. Swedes making it quite often into the final top 5, but they don`t win if their entry is not directed by the late Ingmar Bergman, and "Everlasting Moments" will probably suffer from the same fate.
So the final battle is (as usual, and not only in awards contention) between Germany and France. Logically French "The Class" should be the favourite here - it won the Palme d`Or at Cannes, but for me it`s the main reason why it won`t win. Over the past years it`s been rare that the best film did indeed win the Oscar. In 2008 there should had been a battle between "4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days" and "Persepolis" but neither of this films was even nominated, and "Counterfeiters" won. The year before that there was "Pan`s labyrinth" in the race and it lost to "The lives of others" (a good film, but certainly not that good). In 2006 the palestinian "Paradise Now" should have won, but "Tsotsi" came out as the winner, and so on.