I’m not going to watch the Oscars. Perhaps this year’s crop of nominees is richer than the presence of Extremely Bad and a Little Bit Gross suggests but each year, as the rash of awards ceremonies spreads across the face of public life, I wonder if this self-congratulation is the product of artistic achievement or an attempt to blind eachother to the slump of it. (What’s anybody done to deserve 650kgs of maine lobster? And who’s going to eat it? Aren’t they all vegetarians?)

Still – you won’t find me bemoaning the state of today’s cinema. No sir. In recent times I’ve watched a string of magnificent films: A Prophet, Of Gods and Men, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Hidden, Good Bye, Lenin!. All were brilliant. You may note, however, that their quality is not the only thing they have in common: they’re all the work of furreners. This is not to say there aren’t great filmmakers at work inside the Anglosphere – Lynch, Scorsese, Cronenberg, Los Cohens – but more often than not the films I’ve really enjoyed have been subtitled. It annoys me that “foreign” films are often bunched off at the side of our culture. One finds them in shops or rental stores in their own category: “world cinema”. They’re thought of as a bit pretentious. Strange. Intimidating. (When I was a kid I’d see the fronts of things like Satyricon and assume it was odd porn.) But this is nonsensical. All manner of filmmakers are thrown into this strange class; enigmatic wierdos, sure – and brilliant weirdos at that – but also people whose films are as uncomplicatedly thrilling as anything of the West. I mean, did we need The Departed? It was fun, sure, but Infernal Affairs had better acting; preferable cinematography and no Jack Nicholson. This could sound like a plea for *sigh* diversity but my point is more that great films transcend their contextual trappings. The time and place of some is more relevant than of others, and they’ll have stylistic traits peculiar to different cultures, but you needn’t know or care about Japan to love Ring; about Korea to enjoy Mother; about Spain to get into Timecrimes or about Uzbekistan to like, er – well – okay, I’ll grant my knowledge of the Uzbek scene is limited.

There’s no reason to peculiarize them. The only thing that sets them apart, in many cases, is that you need subtitles to grasp what the actors saying. That can be a pain, I know, but, then, they mumble so much nowadays that that’s often the case with English movies too.