From the first moments after the announcement of this year's Academy Award nominations, there has been a perception that this is the year Oscar goes global.
The 16 combined nominations for "Babel," "Children of Men" and "Pan's Labyrinth," all of them a cosmopolitan jumble of cultures, languages and locales, would be notable even without the media-ready friendship among their three Mexican-born directors, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Alfonso Cuarón and Guillermo Del Toro.
As well, the academy has long had a soft spot for the tradition of the British actor's actor — note the perennial nominations for Judi Dench and Kate Winslet, or even Peter O'Toole — but this year nominations fell more widely on British writers and directors as well, the talent behind such films as "United 93," "The Queen," "Notes on a Scandal" and "Borat." '
Nods also went in main categories to foreign-language pictures "Volver" and "Letters From Iwo Jima."
"We are breaking our old stiff politics of nationalism, those very primitive and very provincial barriers," says best director nominee González Iñárritu. "Every nation has to embrace art as a universal expression, beyond religion, beyond language. And that's what I'm feeling now, the first step."
Patrick Marber, nominated in the best adapted screenplay category for "Notes on a Scandal," adds that he believes these changes are coming not just as effects of a globalizing economy, but from the increased connectedness of cultures as well.
"The entertainment country is the world," he says.
Marber also notes that the human concerns of class and identity at the core of his work cross boundaries of nation and language.
"I don't know where 'Little Miss Sunshine' is set, for example. I don't know those roads. But it feels to me a universal story because it's about a family trying to function. And we all know that.
"I think story is story."
— Mark Olsen
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