Asia eyes Oscar glitz, glamour, even as its own films are absent

Louise Watt / The Associated Press

Beijing—Asia will be tuning in to the Oscars and its glitz and glamour, even though the region’s films are missing from the shortlists.

Users of Chinese social media discuss animatedly whether showbiz comedy Birdman or the 12-years-in the-making Boyhood will win best picture—movies that haven’t been shown in theaters here, but are available on streaming websites.

The interest is evident, even though Asian films are sorely lacking on the foreign-language film category shortlist—something that frustrates some Asian filmmakers and industry insiders, while others expected nothing less from voting dominated by Los Angeles-based Academy members.

The lack of an Asian presence comes despite China and Japan being the world’s second- and third-biggest movie markets in terms of ticket sales. Bollywood churns out more than 1,000 films a year, and only five Indians have ever won at the Oscars, three of whom for 2009 Oscar winner Slumdog Millionaire, a British movie.

“I mean, who wouldn’t want to win an Oscar, but we don’t make films with an eye [on] the Academy,” said Supratik Sen, a writer and assistant director on several Bollywood films. “That whole thing is very Hollywood-centric.”

For film buffs and serious filmmakers in India, recognition at Cannes, Venice and Sundance “has more street cred,” Sen added.

This year, no Asian picture made it to the nine-film shortlist in the foreign-language film category, whittled from 83 films submitted by 83 governments. The nine were chosen by a committee consisting of several hundred L.A.-based Academy members and a foreign-language film award executive committee.

Entries included the Philippines’s Norte: the End of History, director Lav Diaz’s reimagining of Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment; Hong Kong’s The Golden Era, a biographical film about Chinese novelist Xiao Hong, shot partly in a documentary style by award-winning director Ann Hui; and Taiwan’s Ice Poison, about two young people who are caught between lust and drug addiction in Myanmar.

Beijing’s nomination of the Chinese-French co-production The Nightingale surprised film critics, who thought worthier choices were Black Coal, Thin Ice, about a murder within the mining industry that won Berlin International Film Festival’s main Golden Bear prize, and Zhang Yimou’s tearjerker Coming Home, whose events stem from the Cultural Revolution. The Nightingale is director Philippe Muyl’s adaptation of his 2002 French film The Butterfly, and contains lavish shots of the rice paddy landscape of southeast China as a grandfather and granddaughter journey back to his hometown.

China doesn’t reveal the reasons behind its choices, or who is on its nomination committee, thought to be comprised of government officials, artists and film professors. Many film critics believe the government doesn’t want to nominate films that show the country in a bad light, regardless of their chance of winning.

“A Chinese film can only win an Oscar when there is a complete consensus between the Chinese film regulator and the people who run the Oscars,” said director Jiang Wen in an interview at the Berlin Film Festival, where his Gone with the Bullets is competing.

Some Asian entries were chosen to try to cater to the tastes of Western voters. South Korea’s entry was Haemoo, based on a real-life incident in 2001, when eight crewmen of a South Korean fishing boat were arrested for dumping the bodies of 25 Chinese immigrants into the sea after they suffocated in a storage bay.

The country’s entry-picking panel, which includes a director, critic and representatives of movie-production studios and distribution companies, chose the tense thriller mainly because it was well-received at another North American movie event, the Toronto Film Festival, said Kim Mee-hyun, director of international affairs at the Korean Film Council.

“Simply put, the Oscars represent the Americans’ view,” said Steven Tu, a past programmer for the Taipei Film Festival and jury member for the Golden Horse awards, considered the Chinese-language equivalent of the Oscars.

“If we challenge these American views with Asian films and cultures, it’s hard in the first place.”

An animated film from Japan and a short film from China, which are popular genres in their respective countries, did make the shortlists in those categories.

French director Jean-Jacques Annaud sees himself as having made an “Asian film” with his latest work, Wolf Totem, based on a Chinese novel and filmed in China in Chinese. The state hopes it can be an Oscar contender next year, and Annaud said the Chinese backers initially wanted an “English-speaking movie with famous Chinese-American actors” until he talked them round.

Whether a film succeeds at the Oscars also comes down to distribution.

Kim, of the Korean Film Council, said a movie’s quality often wasn’t as important as having a powerful American distributor capable of exposing the work to the larger part of the academy’s 6,000 voting members, a boost Asian films rarely get.