‘4 months’ misses out on Oscar nomination

While Hollywood was generally delighted that two of the year's tougher films - No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood - both figured large in yesterday's Oscar shortlist, the absence of a 'gruelling' Romanian film from the nominations for best foreign language category has stunned those who have seen and championed it. The film in question is 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, written and directed by Cristian Mungiu, which details the difficulties encountered by young women seeing abortions in 1980s Communist Romania.

Co-starring Anamaria Marinca and Laura Vasiliu as two university friends, it won both the Palme d'Or at Cannes and the European Film Award last year, while in America it has already been chosen as 2007's best foreign language film by the National Society of Film Critics and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association.

Yet the Academy totally ignored it for a best foreign-language Oscar nomination. Rolling Stone magazine's Peter Travers called the omission "one of the stupidest things that I've ever seen happen", while the Los Angeles Times claims the film has been "universally considered the best foreign film of the year". (Continued below)

Kenneth Turan of the LA Times blames the tendency of the current Academy committee to favour softer films, such as Brazil's The Year My Parents Went on Vacation - which made the shortlist - and to be resistant to new and difficult films like 4 Months.

But, he writes, "if the foreign-language Oscar is going to be saved from becoming a laughing-stock, measures need to be taken to ensure that its choices are at least within hailing distance of what the rest of the informed film world thinks".