Have we got a pair of slumdog millionaires for you! In Rudo y Cursi, Y tu mamá también co-stars Diego Luna and Gael Garcia Bernal reunite as two hardscrabble soccer fans whisked from the drudgery of small-town banana picking for a shot at the big time. Directed by Alfonso Cuarón’s kid brother Carlos Cuarón, the movie shares many of the charms of that earlier collaboration (Carlos co-wrote Y tu mamá, as well as Alfonso’s Sólo con tu pareja) but suggests a very different dynamic between the two characters.
This time, Luna and Bernal play half-brothers, named Beto and Tato, mutually loyal to their common mother and, to a lesser degree, one another. When they aren’t toiling away in the fields, they spend most of their time on the soccer field. Beto plays goalie, aggressive enough in his manner that his teammates call him “Rudo” (or “rough”), while Tato is such a show-offy forward, his fancy tricks earn him the nickname “Cursi” (“prissy,” in English) — monikers that confuse the fact that each is simultaneously macho and sensitive.
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The Carpetbagger has posted the nine semi-finalists for the Best Foreign Film Oscar Nomination. Comparing this list to the list of 67 films submitted for consideration by their countries of origin, the only real notable omission I can spot is Italy’s Gomorrah; I’ve sen some bloggy chatter already lamenting the exclusion of Let the Right One In, but that film was passed over for submission by its home country of Sweden in favor of Everlasting Moments (which did make the shortlist). The full list, with links to the films we’ve covered (as you’ll see, we have a lot of catching up to do), after the jump.
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Frequent readers of SpoutBlog know that I am head-over-heels in love Carlos Reygadas’ Silent Light, a drama set in a Mexican Mennonite community and shot entirely in the almost-lost German dialect, Plautdeitsch. So of course, I was overjoyed to get a press release last night saying that the film had been deemed eligible as Mexico’s submission for the Foreign Language Oscar.
But then I remembered a scandal a couple of years back, involving an Italian film called Private. At the time, the Academy deemed Private ineligible for the Foreign Language category, because the film was shot in a language (Arabic) other than the primary language of its submitting country, and even after Italy protested, AMPAS said they had no intention of changing the rule. “At this point, we don’t foresee any discussions about this issue,” an Academy spokeswoman told Anthony Kaufmann for indieWIRE. “We like to see the countries represented in the films.”
Funnily enough, according to a press release I dug up on Oscars.org, the Academy went on to change that rule the very next year.
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