E! Online reports that the original French version of March of the Penguins — the one that had what Entertainment Weekly described as “Teletubby-style French music and Hello Kitty script (much of it involving penguins ‘talking’ about their hopes and dreams)” and “courting couples … whisper[ing] foreplay poetry to each other” — has been “snubbed” by whoever it is that decides which French film ought to be considered for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. In its place, the French have nominated the World War I drama Joyeux Noël — and at least one of the Penguins producers, it seems, isn’t happy about this:
On ScreenDaily.com, French-based Penguins coproducer Jean-Francois Camilleri sounded as if he thought his countrymen had missed a golden opportunity in not backing his birds–“finally a foreign film that Americans love.”
“It just proves the stupidity of French politics in this profession,” Camilleri told the Website. “No one has seen [Joyeux Noel] except the people at Cannes, what good does that do?”
Well, yes, it is true that the Oscars are rife with all sorts of stupid politics, and the rule that only one film per nation can be considered for the foreign-language award seems unnecessarily restrictive. It is also not clear to me who gets to decide this in each nation, and how the Academy decides who gets to decide this. And the French may have selected Joyeux Noël not necessarily because they thought it was the best French film, but because they were aware that the Academy seems to be inordinately fond of wartime epics and inordinately reluctant to reward films that happened to be popular (look at how many great documentaries have been snubbed), both of which are questionable prejudices.
But Camilleri is harping on a stupid idea or two of his own if he thinks that a film’s success at the box office makes it a contender for the “best” film. And it is ironic that he would say “no one” has seen Joyeux Noël, when in fact pretty much “no one” in the United States or even in the Academy has seen the original French version of Penguins, either — a version that by all accounts is so tacky that, as Ken Eisner noted, “this is the rare case of a foreign film that has been smartened up for domestic consumption.”
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