People who say that Jews control Hollywood have yet to explain why Israel has the most nominations for the Best International Feature Film Oscar (formerly the Best Foreign Language Film category), without a win.
Israel has had 10 nominations over the years, and the country’s official selection is determined by the winner of the Ophir Award for Best Picture, an award given by the Israeli Academy for Film and Television.
Israel received most of its Oscar nominations before the Ophir Awards were created, with the movie entry chosen by a government-sponsored committee. In those days, few movies were made by Israel, so there was generally little competition.
The Ophir era
The Israeli Academy for Film and Television, established in 1990, began giving awards that year. The award name was changed in 2004 to the Ophir, to honor the memory of actor Shaike Ophir.
Since its establishment, the Israeli film industry has undergone a major revitalization following the passage of the Cinema Law in 2001, which greatly increased government funding available to Israeli movie production.
The development of the Israeli television industry in the 1990s – when several channels were created in addition to the existing public broadcasting channel – helped the growth of the local movie industry, giving actors and filmmakers more opportunities to hone their craft.
The movies that were funded following the passage of the Cinema Law began to be released around 2004, but in the quarter century since its passage, Israel has had only four nominations: two for movies by Joseph Cedar, in 2008 for Beaufort, about an outpost in Lebanon, and in 2012 for Footnote, a story of father-son Talmud scholars; one for Waltz with Bashir, an animated documentary about the Lebanon War by Ari Folman, in 2009; and one for Ajami, by Scandar Copti and Yaron Shani, a drama about Jews and Arabs involved in crime in Jaffa, in 2010.
During the past 12 years, in fact, only one Israeli title has even made the Oscar shortlist – the list of 15 movies from which the final five nominees are drawn: Samuel Maoz’s Foxtrot in 2017.
But since the Cinema Law was passed, many great Israeli movies have been made. So why has the Israeli Academy managed so often to send movies that do not capture the imagination of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) nominating committee?
Oscars are not everything, of course, but even being shortlisted or nominated for such a high-profile international award brings much-needed attention, as well as co-production investment, to Israel’s small film industry. This year’s shortlist will be announced in December.
A crowded field
While there is no way to answer this question definitively, let’s look at what Israeli movies are up against. There are only five Best International Feature nominees, and in a typical year, at least two of those nominations go to world-famous, established directors.
This year, those spots are expected to go to Romanian director Cristian Mungiu’s, Fjord, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, and to Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Minotaur, a movie about corruption in Russia, selected as France’s choice and which took the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes.
Almost every year, there is a very hot movie by newcomers that wins prizes and raves in festivals all over the world. This year it is La Bola Negra, a Spanish film about being gay throughout different eras. So that means that the other 83 films (92 movies were submitted but only 86 were deemed eligible) will have to duke it out for the two remaining spots.
This year, the Israeli Academy gave an unprecedented 16 nominations to Moshe Rosenthal’s Tell Me Everything, an engaging story about a boy who discovers his father is gay at the height of the AIDS crisis. The movie won 10 of those awards, including Best Picture.
It had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival this year, so it has been screened abroad, but when entertainment industry publications released their lists of the frontrunner predictions – Variety, for example, just picked the 20 most likely movies to receive nominations – Tell Me Everything was not among them. This does not mean it will not make the shortlist or receive a nomination, but it isn’t an encouraging sign.
Over the past three years, there have been international calls to boycott all Israeli film and no one knows for sure how this will affect Oscar votes. Tell Me Everything is only one of half a dozen of the submitted movies with LGBTQ themes, in addition to La Bola Negra. Movies with similar themes do not necessarily cancel each other out, since they all tell their stories in a different way. But AMPAS does like to present a varied list of nominees.
Passing on Nesher
The Israeli Academy had another strong choice this year, Avi Nesher’s Our Loves, which tells the story of a group of people who feel they are having the worst day of their lives on October 6, 2023, and then have to cope with the horrors of the Hamas-led massacre on the next day. It drew praise from reviewers for telling human stories that draw people into the events of October 7.
Our Loves attracted two high-profile international producers: Fernando Szew, president of Fox Entertainment; and Danny Cohen, president of Access Entertainment, an executive producer of the Oscar-winning films Conclave and The Zone of Interest.
Cohen spoke enthusiastically about Our Loves at a Jerusalem Film Festival event this summer, saying he thought it had the potential to win Israel’s first Oscar. The film also managed to get accepted to and premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, at a time of rising antisemitism in Canada.
But although the Israeli Academy nominated Our Loves for 12 awards, it won zero and lost out to Tell Me Everything for the top prize. Ophir watchers were not at all surprised, because the awards have a long history of snubbing Nesher, one of Israel’s leading filmmakers for nearly 50 years, whose work is both crowd-pleasing and critically acclaimed.
Many of Nesher’s movies have become Israeli classics, such as The Troupe, Dizengoff 99, and Turn Left at the End of the World. But the Academy did not even bestow a Best Director nomination on him until 2021, for Image of Victory, an audacious movie that dared to look at the 1948 War of Independence from both Israeli and Egyptian perspectives. That year, too, the Israeli Academy chose not to give Nesher’s film any major awards.
Instead, the Israeli Academy sent AMPAS Eran Kolirin’s Let It Be Morning, a fine film, as its 2021 entry. But its plot only makes sense if the audience understands the difference between the situations of Arab Israeli citizens and West Bank Arabs, and the screenplay did not make this distinction crystal clear. As it has every year since 2012, AMPAS passed.
We will never know if Our Loves could have received an Oscar nomination, as Cohen said he thought it could. Once again, the Israeli Academy passed up the chance to send a quintessentially Israeli historical drama to be considered for the award. ■