10 Oscar nominations for Rome by Alfonso Cuaron true revelation of the film year.
No one had raised any objections when he was awarded the Golden Lion in Venice.
After Guillermo del Toro's one-two with "Shape of Water" last year there could be a golden lion - oscar pairing again this year and again thanks to a Mexican filmmaker.
It sounds like the screenplay of an unlikely movie with a surreal plot and instead that's what's happening. In the Trump era, the one where Americans watch the shutdown because their president plays arm wrestling to get several billion in state funding to build a 3,000 km wall on the Mexican border, it's the Mexicans who bring us back to beauty.
Del Toro did it with a light, carefree, fantasy film that taught us what love and tolerance towards the different should be.
Cuaron with his "Roma" plays on the nostalgia effect mainly but above all on a story that brings us universal and borderless feelings and events.
To do so he chooses to shoot a film entirely in black and white and completely spoken in his mother tongue. Nothing less modern and contemporary could be said and instead "Roma" pierces hearts and transcends space-time precisely because it is able to bring everyone back into the same human dimension.
It succeeds in telling us about the neighborhood and the family where Cuaron lived. A wealthy family but broken by a marriage that is about to end but where good feelings and respect have a fixed abode.
There's no music for the entire length of the film and you can hear it. You can hear it because the rhythm is slow, very slow and it puts us through a hard test to be attentive to what is happening on the screen but you can also hear it because when the music disappears the faces, looks and timeless words of characters distant oceans from us and yet so close.
The lack of music and colour makes us appreciate a magnificent photograph where black and white shine their own light and we see the sun shining thanks to an embrace on the seashore and the fire burning in the riots of a bloody riot.
Cinema in its infancy, cinema at its highest level.
The camera moves with wisdom without abruptly detaching but gracefully accompanying us from one alley to another, from one house to another through a tunnel of daily worries and hopes in the Mexico that was.
We don't know if "Roma" will win the Oscars, but he's already won his game with history.
And Netflix won his personal battle, managing to bring one of the most beautiful films of the decade on TV without going through theaters.
The way to enjoy cinema and TV has changed but the beauty of a great movie has remained unchanged.
Thanks to Cuaron for reminding us.
