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.)
