Raspberry ripples and Oscar oddities

Although the UK Film Council lost no time in firing out the usual self-congratulatory press release, it has been a thin year for British nominees at this year's Oscars. And, as Kim Newman, my colleague from the London Film Critics' Circle, points out, there is worse, much worse: home-grown talent is virtually absent from the list of nominees for the Razzies, or Golden Raspberries, the parallel event dedicated to celebrating the very worst of the cinematic year.

Only Robert Pattinson, from the Twilight films, is bravely flying the flag for Blighty at the 30th Razzies which are announced on 6 March, the night before the Academy Awards. "Note the injustice that Sarah Jessica Parker is nominated for Have You Heard About the Morgans? but Hugh Grant's equally poor work in the film is shamefully neglected. Where's Danny Dyer? Clive Owen?" Newman writes today in an impassioned email to the Critics' Circle membership.

Over at the Oscars, another strange trend is in evidence. It has always been a ritual annual moan that these are entirely dominated by the Hollywood establishment. But the American trade newspaper Variety points out one extraordinary feature of this year's line-up: of the ten films nominated for Best Picture, only four are set primarily in the US. Other locations range from the Middle East (The Hurt Locker) and Central America (Up) to South Africa (District 9), France (Inglourious Basterds) and the Planet Pandora (Avatar).

Curiouser and curiouser, many of these nominees have substantial subtitled sequences in languages ranging from Yiddish (A Serious Man) to, yes, Pandoran (Avatar). Inglourious Basterds, in which Christoph Waltz's Nazi is fluent in French, German and Italian, pokes fun at Americans' monolingualism, while Up is moved to include a gag explaining why the dogs in it all speak English (they wear special translator-collars).

And let's not forget that last year's Best Picture winner, Slumdog Millionaire, had long sections in Hindi. Even so, despite all this and the expanded Best Picture category, the distinguished Academy members just couldn't bring themselves to nominate a full-blown foreign-language entry.