Russia nominated the film “The Italian” for Oscar

cinema award

The Committee for Nominating Russian Films as National Candidates for the American Film Academy Awards (Oscar for Best Foreign, or rather, Non-English-Language Film) decided in favor of the film “The Italian” by Andrei Kravchuk. With comments - ANDREY Ъ-PLAKHOV.

This choice sounds sensational and, at first glance, absurd. After all, for the last two years we have only been talking about the invasion of domestic blockbusters on our screens and the triumph of large forms. This was evidenced by last year's Oscar nomination for the box office triumph, Night Watch. This year, neither “The Turkish Gambit” nor “State Counselor” were even considered - apparently due to the fact that the rights to the film adaptation of Boris Akunin’s “Fandorian” were sold to Hollywood, and the Russian versions do not have an international certificate.

An even more ridiculous set of circumstances prevented The Ninth Company by Fyodor Bondarchuk from being nominated for consideration by the American Film Academy. The film was released commercially six days before the deadline stipulated by the rules (in St. Petersburg) and two days before in Moscow, and the same American rules stipulate that the film must be shown in the country of production for at least seven days. It turns out that just 24 hours was not enough for the committee to have grounds to nominate this particular film, which, by all accounts, best meets the Oscar criteria. The most annoying thing is that next year “The Ninth Company” may not be included in the nominations, since then its release date will be too long ago and will again be outside the Oscar regulations. Something similar happened at one time with Nikita Mikhalkov’s painting “The Barber of Siberia.”

As a result, a strange thing happened. Amid talk of an unprecedented rise in the domestic film industry, only three films, and not at all from the blockbuster category, could actually qualify for an Oscar nomination this year. And even then one of them is “Ours” by Dmitry Meskhiev - a picture from last year. It won the main prize at last year's Moscow festival, but was delayed in release and therefore formally found itself in competition with the film "Space as a Premonition" by Alexei Uchitel - also the winner of the MIFF, only this year. It was still somehow strange to nominate “The Ones,” no matter how good the picture was: after a year ago’s success at the Moscow festival, it did not receive an adequate international fate, especially commercial. It is too early to judge “Space as a Premonition” in this aspect, although it is known that the film was very successful at the influential festival in Toronto and was of interest to some American companies.

Apparently, not being sure of the correct choice between the two main candidates, representing different branches of the art-house with production ambitions, the committee took an unconventional move and nominated the film “The Italian” by Andrei Kravchuk, which was awarded the main prize at the Children’s Berlinale, as well as prizes in Blagoveshchensk and at other festivals. This is a melodrama about a six-year-old Russian boy who is adopted by an Italian family, but is trying to find his real mother. There is a common belief that boys, especially very young and homeless ones, most easily melt the hearts of American academics, who are no strangers to spiritual pedophilia. They remember the success at the Oscars of the Czech “Koli” (also with a Russian boy), our “Thief”. Yes, here is the Swedish film “Zozo”, nominated for an Oscar this year by his country - also about an orphan boy: however, he is a victim of the civil war in Lebanon and finds salvation not in Italy, but in Sweden. But Italy put forward a very good film, “Private Lives,” about how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict invades the life of a family living on the border and trying to uphold the ideals of pacifism.

In recent years, Russian Oscar nominations have been unsuccessful: not a single film has won or been nominated. There is no one in particular to blame for this: we don’t have too much choice, and the recipes for success here are quite conventional. However, it is noteworthy that when our film industry was in a protracted crisis of “small picture”, there were more hits: the same “The Thief”, and “Prisoner of the Caucasus”, and “Burnt by the Sun”. Since we have taken the path of “Hollywoodization,” it would behoove us to organize the work of nomination more professionally: it consists not only of voting, but, above all, of creating a system of information, expertise, contacts with producers, and tracking all points of the regulations. So that being a day late does not decide the Oscar fate of the film.

The "Ninth Company" did not have enough days