All About Your Mother

Injustice is never in short supply at the Academy Awards, but some of the greatest absurdities are the result of the rule limiting films eligible for the Best Foreign Film category to one per country, and permitting that one film to be selected by its country’s government.  Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead, but the Spanish government was nevertheless hidebound enough to withhold Talk To Her from consideration by the Academy.  Talk To Her was easily the most thoughtful and heartfelt film I saw last year, so I was gratified to see that Sony Picture Classics’s campaign bore fruit in nominations for Pedro Almodóvar in the Best Director and Best Original Screenplay categories.  In addition to Pedro, I’ll be rooting for The Pianist and Roman Polanski (who was curiously absent from Clinton’s roster of eleventh-hour pardons two years ago).