This year, four European films (Belgian, German, Irish and Polish) and an Argentinian film were nominated for the Oscar for best foreign language film. Which countries have had the most success in the history of the famous American academy?
The Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, as it exists today, has been awarded since 1956, but originally, in 1947, it was an honorary award given by the Academy’s Board of Governors , in the absence of other films nominated in competition.
Italy is the country that has won the most awards for foreign films at the Oscars. Although only one Italian film has won the Oscar this century, during the golden age of Italian cinema, Italy was always the overwhelming favorite. In total, this southern European country won fourteen awards, out of 32 nominations.
The French exception
France is on the heels of Italy with more nominations (41) but has only been rewarded twelve times. The French film industry hasn’t had a night of glory for three decades, with the latest award-winning film being Indochina, in 1993, with Catherine Deneuve.
Japan is a distant third, with five awards, the two most recent being presented in 2009 and 2022. The first three were awarded in the early years of Oscar history.
And the Oscar goes to…
Two European countries are then in the spotlight, with four award-winning films: Spain and Denmark. In total, twenty Spanish films were nominated, against fourteen Danish.
Sweden is a special case, because the same director, Ingmar Bergman, has been awarded three times. Bergman had ten films in competition while his country’s film industry as a whole received sixteen Oscar nominations in this category.
Russian films have won four Oscars for best foreign film, three of which date from Soviet times.
The winning non-English films in the category of best film
Only two non-English speaking foreign films triumphed in the best film category, “The Artist“, in 2012, an essentially silent French film, and the South Korean film “Parasitewho therefore made history in 2020 by winning the prize as the first non-English-speaking winner.
This year, the German anti-war film “All quiet on the Western front” could repeat the story, and not only from a linguistic point of view: in 1930, the first film adapted from the book by Erich Maria Remarque had already received the Oscar for best film.