There are 25 films that won an Oscar for Best International Film that the public judges are better than the winners of the Best Film statuette in the same year.
At least according to the ratings given on the Internet Movie Database (IMDB), a reference website where
Oscar-winning
films usually accumulate tens of thousands of votes from users around the world.
The Italian films
Life is Beautiful
(1997) and
Cinema Paradiso
(1988) are the two international winners that obtain the best marks of all those awarded in the 74 editions of the Oscars.
They competed the same year that the best film was
Shakespeare in Love
and
Driving Miss Daisy
, respectively.
There is no clear pattern that explains the preference for the international film over the main award-winning one.
The country whose films 'won' Best Picture the most times is Italy, with seven films.
There are also two films in Spanish, both Argentine:
The Official History
(1985) and
The Secret in Their Eyes
(2009), which shared the stage at the gala with
Out of Africa
(1985) and
En Tierra Hostile
(2009).
It is notorious that musicals do not usually prevail: the seven times that the best film included songs and dances (
The Sound of Music
,
Chicago
,
West Side History
,
An American in Paris
,
Gigi
,
My Fair Lady
,
Oliver!
) the general public scored better the international film.
There is one exception:
My Fair Lady
(1964), which with 7.7, has a better rating than that year's international,
Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow
, 7.2.
Tom Jones, the least valued
The distances between the ratings of the two films stand out in specific years and the greatest difference in ratings occurs in two films from the 1964 gala: the American
Tom Jones
has a 6.4 on IMDB compared to
Federico Fellini's 8 out of
8 ½
.
Other years, those awarded for best film stand out far above: this is the case of the first two installments of
The Godfather
,
Schindler's List
and
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
, all of them in the list of the 10 best films of the story according to IMDB classification.
2020 was a peculiar year: Bong Joon Ho's
Parasites
won both awards and left the awards ceremony with four golden statuettes.
It was the first South Korean nominee, and also the first to be Best Picture in a language other than English.
Foreign films increased their presence among the Best Picture nominations (regardless of their origin) starting in 1999, with
Life is Beautiful
,
by Roberto Benigni, or
All About My Mother
, by Pedro Almodóvar: so far this has happened in seven occasions.
The phenomenon was made possible by the expansion, starting in 2010, of the list of nominees for Best Picture.
In the following table we collect the notes of the films since 1999.
The big change
The inclusion of more international films among those nominated for Best Picture is related to the increase in the number of members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, as well as its diversity.
In 2012,
the Los Angeles Times
reported that of the Academy's 5,765 voting members, 94% were white and 77% were men.
The institution reacted by increasing diversity and the number of voters, but in 2015 it was reported, especially through the #OscarsSoWhite movement, that white people predominated on the list of nominees.
Since then, the institution presented an opening plan that seeks to redouble the presence of women among voters, as well as “underrepresented ethnic and racial groups.”
Starting in 2019, when the Mexican film
Roma
(2018) was nominated for best film, at least one international film began to be nominated for this category, except in 2021 (that year the Danish film
Otra ronda
took the statuette for Best International Film. ).
For this year's ceremony, the Academy reported that it has 10,500 members representing 75 countries or territories: members from outside the United States are 20% of the total and 34% are women.
The award has been changing: now it goes to an international film, in any language, but until 2019 it had to be in a foreign language (that is, not English).
Before
Life is Beautiful
, the only foreign language film nominated for best film had been
Z
(1969), an Algerian production by Constantin Costa-Gavras.
It occurred in 1970 and has a better rating on IMDB than
Midnight Cowboy
, awarded that same year.
Until 1957 this award was an honorary category, created in 1949, and was awarded for the first time to the production of
Monsieur Vicent
, released two years earlier.
Then there were no nominations, but the academy announced its favorite, a format that only lasted seven years.
What will happen in this year's delivery?
There is a peculiarity: the French film
Anatomy of a Fall
competes for Best Film, but not for Best International Film.
In fact, her country did not present her as a candidate.
In the premier category there is also another non-American candidate:
The area of interest
.
The latter, of British production, also competes in an international film against the Spanish
film The Snow Society
, the Italian film
I Captain
, the Japanese film
Perfect Days
and the German film
Teachers' Room.
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