With the 2024 Oscars shortlists for 10 categories arriving in late December, one key element to look out for is the international contenders with the legs to make it into categories past Best International Feature Film. This time last year, Netflix’s “All Quiet on the Western Front” established itself as a possible Best Picture nominee with multiple craft mentions, and by the March ceremony, the Edward Berger film collected the majority of Academy Awards given to below-the-line artisans.
This year, lightning may strike twice, as established Hollywood filmmaker J.A. Bayona’s “Society of the Snow” (Netflix), Spain’s official submission for Best International Feature Film, landed on four shortlists. A last-minute premiere at the Venice Film Festival, the moving retelling of the harrowing story of how the Uruguayan rugby team survived a plane crash in the Andes in 1972 has been building momentum as a must-watch among voters this holiday season.
Still to come is a wider theatrical release of Jonathan Glazer’s German-language “The Zone of Interest” (A24), which is looking to build momentum after winning the Grand Prix prize at Cannes back in May, followed by enthusiastic response on the fall festival circuit. The United Kingdom submission for Best International Feature Film, an adaptation of the 2014 Martin Amis novel about a Nazi commandant during World War II building a comfortable domestic life in the shadow of Auschwitz, was also recognized for its Sound and Original Score.
Missing from the international contenders were buzzy titles “The Delinquents” (Argentina), “The Settlers” (Chile), and “Traces” (Croatia). Surprise entries include “Amerikatsi” (Armenia, Variance Films) and “The Monk and the Gun” (Bhutan, Roadside Attractions), from nominated “Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom” filmmaker Pawo Choyning Dorji.
Now the international committee, which is comprised of voters across the Academy’s 17 branches who live all over the world, will watch the 15 selections before picking their final five.
Documentaries “Four Daughters” (Kino Lorber) and “20 Days in Mariupol” (PBS) also made it onto multiple shortlists, with the Best Documentary Feature Film contenders representing Tunisia and Ukraine, respectively, in Best International Feature Film. Meanwhile, Morocco’s submission “The Mother of All Lies,” which lacks a deep-pocketed distributor and shared the Best Documentary prize at Cannes with “Four Daughters,” was snubbed for Best Documentary Feature Film.
Also left off the documentary shortlist were critically hailed “Pigeon Tunnel,” “The Mission,” “Little Richard: I Am Everything,” “The Deepest Breath,” and “Kokomo City.” Under-the-radar entries that made the cut include “Apolonia, Apolonia,” which has no distributor, “Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of the Midnight Cowboy” (Zeitgeist Films/Kino Lorber), “In the Rearview” (Film Movement), Sundance entry “A Still Small Voice” (Abramorama), and “To Kill a Tiger” (National Film Board of Canada). Now the documentary branch will watch all 15 titles to determine the final five nominees.
The shortlists also reveal strength for big-budget Oscar contenders. As previously announced, “Oppenheimer” (Universal) was ineligible for the Best Visual Effects shortlist, but made it onto the lists for Makeup and Hairstyling, Sound, and Score. While “Barbie” (Warner Bros.) has five entries, three are on the Best Original Song list.
Speaking of that category, some notable omissions include Jack Black’s “Peaches” from “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” (Universal) and “A World of Our Own” from “Wonka” (Warner Bros.), the current number one film at the box office, but the as-yet-unreleased movie musical “The Color Purple” (Warner Bros.) was still able to get two new songs onto the shortlist.
Though the short film categories are often glossed over by general audiences, given how inaccessible they are to non-Academy members, both Wes Anderson’s Netflix project “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar” and Pedro Almodóvar’s Saint Laurent-funded queer Western “Strange Way of Life” made the shortlist for Best Live Action Short Film, making the category starrier than usual this year — and taking away slots that in other years might have gone to rising filmmakers.
