Last year mymovies.it made a rather ingeniuous preemptive strike against the Academy Awards, assuming Terraferma would not be nominated for an Oscar.I don’t know if they were being serious, sarcastic, or ironic, but I found if funny.

Since no one is putting this year’s submission, Cesare Deve Morire, on their picks for an Academy Award, let’s get our sour grapes out and ready.

Posted originally on September 30, 2011 by Cheri for I Love Italian Movies. Where it says Crialese and Terraferma, just substitute The Taviani Brothers and Cesare Deve Morire.

Italy Gets Its Sour Grapes Ready In Advance

Mymovies.it has done what I do when I am hoping for something good to happen but want to remain cool and act like I don’t care; they are getting ready for Crialese’s Terraferma to be ignored by the Academy Awards. Don’t we all do that? We’re hoping to get a promotion at work and we say, “I probably won’t get it – the boss plays golf with the other candidate and it’s too political anyway.” We want to be elected PTA president and we tell people that it’s a lot of work and we don’t care if we win because we really don’t have time for it.

But we always want to win.

So Robert Bernocchi from mymovies.it has set it up for us – if Italy’s submission for Oscar consideration is not chosen, we’ll look like “we really didn’t want it anyway”.

We Don’t Care If We Don’t Win Because…

1) How do we make the right choice? Who knows what those nut cases are looking for on any given year anyway and we’ll never know if another film might have done better.

2) We want to choose a film that is exportable but how can we know that? Gomorrah did very well abroad but didn’t even make it to the short list for the Oscars. If someone can tell us what the hell they are looking for, please come forward.

3 ) The rules are always changing anyway and a formula for choosing that worked one year might not work the next. And don’t forget, Italian cinema doesn’t have the support of Miramax anymore that in the 90s produced 3 Oscars for La vita è bella.

4 ) There are more than 60 candidates for one prize – the odds are against us.

5 ) Who really cares anyway about the debatable opinion of a group that is going to make a pretty random choice anyway. Better to worry about ourselves and how well our movies do abroad than worry about this silly Oscar.

Yeah! In-your-face Academy Awards. You’re not the boss of us!