I found The Counterfieters to be a tremendous film. Are you referring to the fact that Diving Bell wasn't nominated? Which sucks but says nothing about Counterfieters. And I really like The Lives of Others.

I found The Counterfieters to be a tremendous film. Are you referring to the fact that Diving Bell wasn't nominated? Which sucks but says nothing about Counterfieters. And I really like The Lives of Others.

I'm also a fan of The Counterfeiters - - one of the best foreign films I saw last year...

So how bad was Departures? It hasn't even played in my town yet...

This is not about dissing Departures, guys. It's about WWB being high above the rest and not winning.

Take this with a grain but I've been told that Departures won due to a very old but still effective hide-the-ball screening strategy. The fact that it won the Oscar surprised a lot of people so theories have been kicking around. The hide-the-ball strategy, while hardly complex, certainly sounds clever.

Since those foreign-film committee members who vote for the foreign film Oscar have to verify that they've seen all five nominees, the Departures team decided to try to eliminate potential votes for their chief competitors, Waltz with Bashir and The Class, by simply restricting the number of Departures screenings.

The fewer the screenings, the fewer chances existed that Bashir and Class supporters could get to see Departures. The odds that they might miss the Japanese film altogether were therefore increased, as well as possibly disqualifying themselves from casting final ballots.

The publicists involved, Fredel Pogodin in Los Angeles and Sophie Gluck in Manhattan, obviously couldn't control who liked which film, but being experienced publicists they do know, I'm told, who the older impressionable softies are among the foreign-film committee. So their strategy became to make sure that the softies voted and also to try and increase the odds that hipper, edgier, more discerning voters -- the ones who were theoretically more likely to vote for Bashir or The Class -- might potentially be kept from voting by failing to see Departures. Simple.

The older and more conservative types, according to this theory, were likely to respond to the delicate emotional character of Departures. They also might also be more uncomfortable with Bashir's unusual combination of animation and documentary realism, and with its criticism of Isarel's conduct during the Lebanon war.

The oldies, one hears, also tend to be a bit bored with a film like The Class, which uses an intellectual, underplayed, soft-spoken approach in telling a story of a group of French high-school teachers and students.

To keep Departures as hidden as possible, it wasn't shown to press at all during the Oscar campaign time. Not for nothing was Pogodin's first e-mailed invitation for the two press screenings (or at least the first one I received) sent out on 2.17.09 -- the deadline day for final Oscar ballots. Gluck didn't invite New York-area press until 2.23, the day after the Oscar telecast.