Dead to me

The AV Club has been in something of a tailspin since most of its senior staff took off for The Dissolve. But when you give the Criterion release of Babette’s Feast a C+ and lead with a graf like this…

Anyone looking put themselves into a quick coma for some reason should consider sitting down and watching a lot of the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar winners from the ’80s and ’90s. Most of these films aren’t bad, by any means, but AMPAS tends to be drawn—even today, but especially back then—to blandly inspirational period pieces rather than to the truly vital work being done all over the world. Babette’s Feast, which won the award in 1988, exemplifies the kind of foreign film the Academy loves: tasteful, literary, unchallenging, faintly dull.