Arlo North | Content Writer

Let’s be honest, the Oscars don’t have the best track record when it comes to best picture nominations. These infamous snubs range from icons such as Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing to modern classics such as Barry Jenkins’ If Beale Street could Talk and David Fincher’s Zodiac. However, the most criminal of Oscar leftovers are often foreign films, with the Academy clearly having the philosophy: “We’ll just bang it into ‘Best International Film’ and be done with it”. But this would all change on February 9^th of 2020 when, much to the surprise of viewers, Bong Joon-Ho’s Parasite won best picture. It was a seminal moment, to say the least, becoming the first foreign-language film to win in that category, and over the ceremonies since we have watched the presence of foreign-language films become heightened in the Best Picture category, including the upcoming ceremony, which boasts both Johnathan Glazer’s gut wrenching The Zone of Interest and Justine Triet’s brilliant Anatomy of a Fall.

So, what’s the problem then? Well, in my opinion, there is an obvious hole in the Best Picture nominees this year, and it belongs to J. A. Bayona’s Society of the Snow. 

Society of the Snow tells the true story of the Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, which crashed in the middle of the Andes while transporting a student Rugby team to Santiago, Chile. This leaves the boys stranded for 72 days with no food, water, or chances of survival, leading them to have to resort to cannibalism, only managing to escape their predicament by staging a daring crossing of the Andes to get to Argentina.

While the film is very much an ensemble piece – starring Argentinian and Uruguayan newcomers – it is primarily told from the perspective of Numa Turcatti (Enzo Vogrincic), who acts as are narrator for two thirds of the film until his death. From there, we follow the perspective of Nando Parrado (Agustin Pardella), who makes the daring crossing through the Andes to Argentina to try and find help. The film is a morbidly beautiful tale of survival and brotherhood. We spend plenty of time with all the characters, learning who they are and what they have to lose, so when the film reveals to us that the only way for the boys to survive is to eat the dead, it makes the moment even more impactful. 

J. A. Bayona himself is perhaps the most important player in this whole project. Being both writer and director, his vision is clear from the start. – with his signature style of hard, dirty closeups, and swooping ensemble shots. In fact, the crash scene itself is – in my opinion  – Oscar worthy. It comes after a few moments of turbulence are used as background for a conversation between the boys about the route the plane is taking, then almost out of nowhere the plane hits a mountain peak and goes down. We watch as the pilots die, and many of the boys are crushed by the movement. The scene has no music and hardly any sound but rushing wind, the sound of cracking bone and impact with the ground. Once they are on the ground and manage to escape, the miles and miles of snow stretched out in front of them appear impossibly foreboding. Bayona’s use of spectacle and distance gives life to what would otherwise be a pretty monotonous landscape. He is able to capture the distinct months as they pass agonisingly slow, with the boys being sent deeper into despair and with even less likelihood of rescue. His writing is also breath-taking – a script filled with hopelessly poetic monologues and frantic, angry dialogue, the film’s final line echoes in my head still:

“When you speak of us, tell them what we did on the Mountain”. 

Therefore, the Oscars’ complete snubbing of Society of the Snow is – in my opinion – one of the biggest miscarriages of nomination in the academy’s history. My hope now is that the film can take home Best International Film. It truly was the most emotional response I’ve had to a piece of cinema in a long time, and I encourage anyone who hasn’t yet seen it to take a few hours and experience it.