As I walked through the streets of Cannes last February, a local cinematheque was awash in posters for one of the current films. Although I knew nothing of Edith Piaf, and had no way of knowing that the film would end up with three Oscar nominations a year later, there was something about the image that sparked my curiosity. With good reason, it turns out. While Marion Cotilliard may have received her Oscar nomination by virtue of playing the lead in a biopic requiring significant prosthetic makeup, she deserves the award for a truly stunning performance, convincingly inhabiting a character over the period of some twenty-five very hard-living years.
For the uninitiated, like me, Piaf is considered to be something of a French national treasure, and her rags to riches story is the sort of things big biopics yearn to tell. At the end of a rough childhood fraught with disease and sickness and various degrees of orphanhood, Edith is discovered to have a natural ability to belt out a tune. Her skills improve as she progresses from street musician to burlesque singer to touring headliner, all the while finding it impossible to escape the shadows of her past, all the while consuming vast amounts of alcohol. The story is powerful. Sure, we’ve seen the musical biopic before, yet this one rises above the sense that the movie was merely inevitable. However, I was frustrated by the choices the director and writer made, focusing on some non-essential aspects of her younger life and leaving unexplored some contours of her adult persona. Nonetheless, this movie deserves the praise it has received. The next time I pass a captivating poster, I will know to buy a billet.
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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