If people do want to become a member of the AFI and vote next year then this page is a good place to start. You’ll note that a full membership for one year is $55. That’s less than $5 a month folks and it gets you a whole bunch of benefits as well as being able to vote and therefore significantly increase your credibility when commenting on the results.

A final note – I am in no way connected to the AFI but these days I am all about supporting positive aspects of the Australian film industry rather than simply looking for more opportunities to deride it.

I would strongly endorse Thomas’s comments about more people getting involved in the AFI membership and voting process. Have your say people!

Rochelle Siemienowicz
AFI editor

in fact. i suspect many off the people who work at the AFI share our frustrations about Disgrace missing out

Don’t bet. I think some of them are overjoyed and are rubbing there hands in glee

Disgrace completely missing out like this is, well, a bit of a disgrace I agree. However, it should be noted that the AFI members vote on what films should get nominated and those votes are then calculated by KPMG. So, with the exception of the TV categories, the AFI per se has nothing to do with selecting the nominations. In fact, I suspect many of the people who work at the AFI share our frustrations about Disgrace missing out.

What we really need are more qualified and informed AFI members who actually see all the films and vote accordingly. Anybody who works in the film industry or has any sort of legitimacy as a critic can qualify as a professional member, which allows them to vote across several categories. It really doesn’t cost very much and getting the accreditation is quite straightforward so I’m not sure why more critics and commentators don’t do it.

Cheers
Thomas

I hope you print this because I also submitted the above to the AFI . But I doubt very much that they will add it to their comment section. So much for the freedom of speech within the AFI .

A shame all in all, personally I preferred it to Blessed which I thought is the weakest film of the bunch. Say what you will about Beautiful Kate, but I still find it to be a brave film despite my own reservations… I suppose I hold it in similar light to Disgrace if you substitute ‘brave’ for ‘challenging’.

Much of the power of the story (in both book AND film) comes from the challenges it offers the reader/ viewer to make complete sense of it. The way it resists a pat, easy reading is part of its strength. It’s something you keep thinking about. Maybe that strain of anti-intellectualism in the Australian culture jibes at that.

I’ve given this a lot more thought since I posted this piece twelve hours ago and I now suspect there were three main factors that worked against Disgrace getting any nominations:

1. It significantly lacked a big marketing drive so it simply didn’t have the public awareness that a brilliantly marketing film like Mao’s Last Dancer had. I don’t want to say too much because a lot of my thoughts on the Australian film industry will be going into a piece that I am getting published next year, but I think poor and/or under-resourced marketing is a significant problem in general for many Australian films.

2. It is a film that is very difficult to digest at first and requires time, distance and ideally conversation to unravel its attributes. I only gave it 3.5 out of 5 stars at the time and I suspect a second viewing and more thought would result in me giving it a higher score. Many AFI voting members may have only caught it during the AFI screenings that occurred close to the voting period so they may not have benefited from the digestion period that a film like this requires.

3. Mao’s Last Dancer got away with not being a particularly Australian film because it told a fairly universal rag to riches/overcoming all adversary story. Disgrace, on the other hand, tells a story that is very specific to post-Apartheid South Africa so possibly didn’t resonate with many Australian audiences.

These factors on their own probably wouldn’t have mattered but I’m guessing that it is the combination of all three that significantly worked against Disgrace.

Totally agree re: Disgrace. Such a complex film and very deserving of more recognition. Its release here was a bit crap considering the novel helped win its author a Nobel Prize, and the second time I saw the film it was a blocky pixelated digital projection at the Westgarth (the first time was a lovely 35mm version). I wonder if nominators just missed this one, or if they saw inferior versions?