Hearing clapping at the end of a film is unusual these days (in most American cinemas, anyway, outside of special screenings with actors or filmmakers in attendance). Hearing clapping at the end of a film screening in my home theater is more unusual. 
That kind of expression seems a little silly, especially when the “audience” is so often just my wife and I. Sometimes you’ll hear sniffles, and sometimes sighs, often a short verbal comment as the beginning of a discussion. But not clapping. Nonetheless, I was moved to put my hands together a few times during the closing credits of The Class, Laurent Cantet and François Bégaudeau’s masterfully crafted dramatization of the lives of students and teachers in a working class Paris high school, based upon Bégaudeau’s memoir. Perhaps in part because Bégaudeau plays a version of himself (a French teacher named Françios Marin), but more because of the improvisational style that Cantet imposed upon a group of really remarkable, magnetic young characters/actors, The Class contains more genuine vitality per foot of film than anything I’ve seen in a long time.
The premise is simple: the film begins a few days before the first day of school and ends on the final day. The school serves a low-income neighborhood with a high immigrant population, so Mr. Marin’s French class serves as a fertile microcosm for the educational and social challenges faced by the students. While order must be maintained, both the rules and the academic expectations are both flexible and accommodating. But the real marvel of the film is that none of the students, parents, or faculty fit any of the likely molds that less ambitious filmmakers might employ. Mr. Marin is a flawed hero. He is genuinely motivated to connect to the entire class, but clearly takes an interest in some students more than others. He shows a remarkable ability to converse with the students almost as a peer and yet maintains some semblance of order.
The beauty of the film is encapsulated in one of the last scenes, where each student is revealing what he or she thinks has personally been learned in all of the classes all year. At the final bell, in a moment punctuated by a quiet, devastating sadness, a student we saw in an early scene reveals that Mr. Marin, the school, and we as the audience, have completely overlooked her. It is a moment of such subtle comlexity, one which couldn’t connect with us had the previous minutes not been carefully orchestrated into such a wonderfully organic symphony.
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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