What Have We Won?: An Oscar (Nomination)

Have you ever confused ‘The Green Mile’ with ‘8 Mile’? ‘10 Years A Slave’ with ‘10,000 BC’? Yes, pretending to be a film intellectual is hard, especially in Iceland, where there’s only one movie theatre dedicated to the more chichi side of film.

But don’t worry—to show the world you’re an Icelandic film connoisseur and show your smarts off to that hot TA, there’s one work that you should know. It’s called ‘Börn náttúrunnar’ (‘Children of Nature’) and it’s the only Icelandic picture to ever be nominated for an Oscar (in 1991), and as we know, Oscar picks are the crème de la crème.

Cinematic seduction

Directed by Friðrik Þór Friðriksson, the film is about an old couple, Þorgeir and Stella, who decide to bucket-list it and go visit the town they grew up in. It’s a lighthearted work, for sure, but still filled with those lovely emotional moments that’ll give you butterflies.

The New York Times described the film as, “an intelligent film, not easily categorised,” that, “considers death as the perfectly natural, inevitable end of the life cycle”. High praise, right? If you want to sound particularly contemplative and brainy, recite that word-for-word to that sexy TA you’re trying to impress. This is fail-proof cinematic seduction.

Punishing the innocent

“We demand a recount.”

Unfortunately, the film didn’t win, and instead the academy chose ‘Mediterraneo’ by the Italian director Gabriele Salvatores. That said, ‘Mediterraneo’ is a film about WWII and, as we know, the Academy is a sucker for trauma porn. What, are we supposed to punish Icelanders for not sending all their young men to die just because some Germans took over a Polish radio station? We demand a recount.

See more things we’ve won here.