It’s movie awards season with all the usual hoopla and snark, often about the nominations of the right people for the wrong roles or the wrong people altogether. I’m not immune. Sam Elliott is swell, but his supporting nod for “A Star Is Born” is silly. It is a nothing part compared to his unnoticed work in “Prancer,” “The Big Lebowski, and “Off the Map.”
Worse, he is taking up a long overdue nomination for the subtle, skillful Jonathan Pryce in “The Wife.”

Also overlooked is Rosamund Pike for “A Private War,” and anyone associated with “The Sister’s Brothers.” There’s also the perpetual overvaluing of melodramas posing as tragedy and the slighting of comedy whose depths are ignored. So, Ethan Hawke gets noticed for the gloomy “First Reformed” but gets nothing for Juliet, Naked.” Also, MIA are “Tully,” “A Simple Favor,” et al.

But that’s not what I want to talk about. In all the movie talk surrounding the awards, one interesting observation caught my eye in a discussion of Asghar Farhadi, the courageous, clever Iranian writer-director who has won two Oscars for best foreign film, “A Separation,” 2011 and “The Salesman” from 2016. His latest film is a departure in that it is a Spanish production staring Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem.

The author of the piece noted the extreme rarity of a person writing or directing or doing both for a film not in their native tongue. I’m sure that’s the case. It seems to a monoglot like me miraculous. Still Farhadi is not alone. There are other such cases of adapting to a new language, often by immigrants or refugees forced by circumstance to make such a change. One of the greatest British novelists, Joseph Conrad, was a Polish speaker who wasn’t fluent in spoken English until he was in his twenties.

Nabokov grew up in Tsarist Russian and learned several languages in addition to his native tongue, but his first nine novels were in Russian. Only the necessity of fleeing the Russian Revolution and then the rise of Nazi Germany forced him to move to America and write in English where he arguably did his greatest work.

Ruth Prawer was a German-Jew also forced to flee Hitler. She was educated in England, married an Indian man to become Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, and spent many years in the subcontinent writing in English stories about Indian life. She became most famous, however, as the screenwriter of films adapted form English classics. She won two Oscars for E., M. Forster’s “A Room with a View,” and “Howard’s End,” as well as adapting three works by Henry James, “The Bostonians,” “The Golden Bowl,” and “The Europeans.”

She also adapted “The Remains of the Day” by Kazuo Ishiguro. Like her, Ishiguro is a transplant. He was born in Nagasaki and grew up in a Japanese speaking home while attending school in Surrey, England where his family moved when he was five. He learned the new language sufficiently well to have won the Nobel Prize for his English novels.

One might also add the similar case of Robert Riskin who was born in New York and wrote the screenplays for many of the films of Frank Capra. So, why’s he on the list? He was he son of Jewish immigrants whose first language was Yiddish. He learned colloquial English by sneaking into playhouses in the 1920s. He learned it well enough to pen “It Happened One Night,” “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,” “Lost Horizon” and many more.

Best for last is one of the most decorated of filmmakers, and at first glance the writer-director of entirely American tales. He won three Oscars for writing or directing and was nominated for nine more. Among his films are “Some Like It Hot,” “Sabrina,” “The Apartment,” “Sunset Boulevard,” “Double Indemnity,” “The Seven Year Itch,” “Love in the Afternoon,” and Stalag 17.”

We’re talking about Billy Wilder whose cynical eye for man’s unreliability bespeaks his Viennese origins. His melodramas are satiric, his comedies dark, and he is arguably the pioneer of film noir. Wilder moved as a young man to Berlin where he was a newspaper reporter before joining the booming Weimar Germany film industry as a scenarist in the era before talkies arrived.

Hitler’s rise prompted him to decamp, first to France but soon to Hollywood where he collaborated with fellow writer Charles Brackett and later with I.A.L. Diamond. He became a director, he claimed, to protect his scripts from butchery. A jazz fan as a young man, Wilder had a non-native speaker’s appreciation for the beat of American street talk, slang and wisecracks.

He fruitfully combined that with a taste for clever juxtapositions – the dour Soviet woman and the blithe Parisian boulevardier in “Ninotchka,” the wised-up nightclub chanteuse and the unworldly compilers of an encyclopedia in “Ball of Fire” which provides a grown-up parody of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” with a mobster as the wicked stepmother.

Wilder may have spoken with a German accent all his life, and drawn on the libertine ways of fin de siècle Vienna and louche Weimar Berlin, but he had an ear for American colloquialism and an eye for the hypocrisy that hid the darkness of his adopted Los Angeles just behind the glittering façade.