Experienced outside of its contemporary social and cultural context, Loves of a Blonde is an oddity, a great example of cinema’s ability to deliver a mixture of the idiosyncratic and the universal. Here we are introduced to a few inhabitants of a factory town in the countryside surrounding Prague, a place where the type of factory labor available has caused the town’s population to be disproportionately female. Our heroine Andula is a prototypical resident: a very young girl who airbrushes shoes all day and then retires to a collegiate-style dormitory with her blue-collar sorority sisters to chat about boys.
Despite the competitive sex ratio, Andula has attracted a number of suitors, hence the title. Things heat up, in a variety of ways, when Andula takes a liking to Milda, a young pianist in town for the night to play at a military dance orchestrated by the factory’s manager. It turns out that Milda, who lives in Prague with his parents, is a bit of a womanizer, and his encounter with the naive Andula has the unintended consequence of her impulsive decision to show up on his doorstep several days later.
Director Milos Forman, who drew inspiration for the film from an amalgam of his own observations and collected stories, claims that Loves of a Blonde was a great commercial success in Czechoslovakia. Ironically, that success permitted him to direct the anti-establishment The Firemen’s Ball, which promptly ended his Czechoslovakian film career. There are hints of his irreverence here (especially in the portrayal of three pathetic soldiers, whose attempts to impress Andula and her friends are truly cringe-worthy). This film is intended as a character study (of Andula, Milda, and young Czech society), however, and to that extent isn’t entirely successful. Watching the film, I was reminded of Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (Milda shares traits with Antoine Doinel), a film which brings to life the type of richly-textured protagonist which fails to materialize here.
Here are this morning’s Oscar-nominated films, alphabetically. The nominees for foreign language film and documentary feature are compiled at the end of the list. (Short format nominees are listed in a 
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