Oscar joins foreign legion

79th Academy Awards take an international trip
By BRUCE KIRKLAND -- Toronto Sun

Hollywood has finally discovered, embraced and celebrated the rest of the world with its Oscar nominations.

In a surprising breakthrough, the voters at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences have taken their heads out of their butts — if you want to get crude about your metaphors — and spread the wealth around.

And not just to its traditional ‘outpost’ of Britain.

The real message in the nominations, announced yesterday, is that Americans are discovering that cinema speaks many languages, that stories are set in many cultures, and that you don’t always need a blond-haired, blue-eyed American hero to propel a movie.

Hollywood has occasionally looked internationally in the past, with recent examples from Life Is Beautiful to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but they were exceptions to the rule — perhaps even tokenism. Not this year.

In the best-picture category, Babel is a true international production, on screen and off. It is a U.S. project made mostly by Mexicans with stories set in Japan, Morocco and in the two Californias (U.S. and Mexico). Languages spoken in the movie include English, Japanese, Spanish and Arabic.

Oscar oldtimer Clint Eastwood is back in Oscar contention, but not for the Yankee-centric World War II film Flags Of Our Fathers. Instead, it is for his Japanese spin-off film, Letters From Iwo Jima. Except for three scenes in English, the film plays entirely in Japanese. Eastwood’s objective was to look at the same conflict he depicts in Flags from a Japanese point of view. (Co-writer and London, Ont., native Paul Haggis is up for best original screenplay.)

Stephen Frears’ British film The Queen did extremely well. It’s up for best picture, and Helen Mirren is the runaway favourite as best actress for her portrayal of Queen Elizabeth II.

Even Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, while set in Boston, is based on the popular Hong Kong action series, Infernal Affairs. The Departed is the odds-on front-runner for best picture, in a narrow margin over Babel.

The only truly original Hollywood movie in the running for best picture is the wonderful tragi-comedy Little Miss Sunshine, the little engine that could. Its inclusion is probably what smacked down Dreamgirls and kept it out of the best-picture lineup. That was a shock, but also a pleasant surprise because Dreamgirls is conventional.

In the acting categories, nominations reflect the most ethically diverse group ever, even if you don’t count Canadian Caucasian Ryan Gosling — a London, Ont., native — who’s up for best actor in Half Nelson.

Five of the 20 acting nominees are of African heritage, including Benin-born Djimon Housou for Blood Diamond. The others are African-Americans Will Smith, Forest Whitaker, Eddie Murphy and Jennifer Hudson. The efforts and remarkable success of Denzel Washington and Halle Berry have finally made it routine for blacks to be given their rightful due at the Oscars.

There are two Latino actresses. Spain’s Penelope Cruz for Volver is the first best-actress nominee from an all-Spanish language film. That generated a squeal of delight from co-host Salma Hayek yesterday at the Oscar-noms announcement (as she and Cruz are pals). The other Latino nominee is Mexican veteran Adriana Barraza for Babel. Barraza plays Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett’s maid, the woman who makes “the mistake” of taking their children on a trip to Mexico, only to run afoul of the U.S. border patrol.

There is one Asian nominee, the Japanese singer-actress Rinko Kikuchi, who plays the deaf girl in the Tokyo segment of Babel.

In other categories, Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth scored heavily with his adult fantasy, set in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. While it was shunned as best picture, it took six nominations overall. That includes the best foreign-language category, where it will compete against Toronto filmmaker Deepa Mehta’s Water.

The acting categories also show that Hollywood is ready for fresh faces, even from America.

Ten are first-timers. Seven have been nominated before but have never won, including seven-time loser Peter O’Toole, who scored his eighth nom — and first since 1982 — for Venus. Judi Dench, Cate Blanchett and Meryl Streep won previously.

Streep added to her now legendary acting record with her 14th nom, two more than Katharine Hepburn and Jack Nicholson.