I bet no one gave All Quiet more than a few seconds’ thought as a potential Oscar winner until last fortnight, when its run of success at the Baftas – seven awards, including best picture and best director – had even its own director shaking his head in disbelief. Repeating the trick seems unlikely, but stranger things have happened: remember when Green Book nipped in between Roma, The Favourite and BlacKkKlansman to win best picture in 2019? And non-English language films do have some form: All Quiet is the 15th to get a best picture nomination, though admittedly Parasite, in 2020, was the only one to actually go on and win the thing).
All Quiet’s achievements at the Baftas may have gotten a bit lost in the post-show roar over diversity, Bernard Cribbins and Angela Bassett Did the Thing, but while Everything Everywhere All at Once is the clear favourite for the Oscars, All Quiet is on its shoulder, having picked up as many noms as The Banshees of Inisherin. Could it go all the way? Well, it’s certainly a brilliantly made film, achieving a level of battlefield realism for the first world war that is gut-churning. Plus the unfamiliar perspective – that of the hapless, naive German soldiers whom we Brits are more used to thinking of as efficiently murderous killers mowing down Our Boys – gives the film a patina of strangeness and takes it outside the usual territory. (This even applies to the distinctly odd final-armistice scenes, which seek to cast the French top brass as heartless warmongers in contrast to the pleadingly humane Germans.)
On the other hand, All Quiet’s chances will probably be harmed by a lack of interest in the first world war among the (mostly) US voting pool. Unlike the second world war, and other major conflicts in which the US participated, the first doesn’t seem to have left as deep a scar on the national psyche – not when compared to those of the European nations involved in it. When his Michael Morpurgo adaptation War Horse was released in 2012, Steven Spielberg pointed out the conflict wasn’t taught in US schools, despite more than 50,000 US soldiers dying in the conflict.
It also can’t help that the German reception of the film has been so ambivalent. One critic described it as “148 minutes of blockbuster-compatible war kitsch”. Ouch.
All Quiet’s main strength, I suspect, is the same one that could be seen as a weakness in a different context: it doesn’t play into the contentious and/or empowering areas of the contemporary discourse that other films are using to fuel their campaigns, whether it’s toxic masculinity (Banshees), racial violence (Till), cancel culture (Tár), or repulsive rich people (Triangle of Sadness). All Quiet isn’t taking a position or trumpeting its significance. It’s just an amazingly powerful film about an epochal historical event whose consequences we are all still living with today. That, though, may not be enough.
