Perhaps you have grown tired of this year's burning Oscar questions: Did anyone actually stay awake for all of Benjamin Button?

Is Kate Winslet "self-deprecating and ordinary" or "drippy" and "vain"?

Will Hollywood slobber all over Mickey Rourke or are his Chihuahuas still his biggest fan? (And R.I.P. to the one who passed away this week).

Why not switch topics? NG Live showed all the foreign film nominees last weekend at National Geographic headquarters as part of its All Roads Film Project. In case you missed them, here's what you need to know to weigh in on contenders for the foreign film statue:

The Baader Meinhof Complex
In a nutshell: This two-and-a-half hour bloodbath chronicles the heyday of the West German terrorist group the Red Army Faction (RAF), which the German media dubbed the Baader-Meinhof Gang after founding members Andreas Baader and journalist Urlike Meinhof.
Origins: Adapted from a book by Stefan Aust, former editor-in-chief of the German news mag, Der Spiegel.
Opening scene: Meinhof's children frolic on a nudist beach. It's a moment of symbolic innocence before a decade of riots, bombings, and assassinations consumes West Germany.
Local reaction: Many German critics fear the film glamorizes the terrorists; others laud its courage to eschew the good-versus-evil paradigm.
Foreign flavor: German radical fashion in the ‘70s consisted of boots, skirts and Kalashnikovs.
Weird fact: The Baader-Meinhof Complex steals its title from the so-called "Baader-Meinhof phenomenon"—a person hears a weird fact for the first time, then encounters the same fact again and again. A Minnesota man allegedly coined the term when he wrote to a "Bulletin Board" column in the St. Paul [Minnesota] Pioneer Press and told how he first learned about the Baader-Meinhof gang and then what should happen soonafter but a second mention of ... the Baader-Meinhof gang.
Oscar odds: The violence might be too much for voters, but the film serves scenes to savor and epic themes to digest.
–Oliver Uberti

The Class
In a nutshell: A youngish French junior high school teacher in a "difficult" city school struggles to teach—and control--a class of often insolent students, many from immigrant families. There are clashes, there is frustration, there is wry humor at year's end when one student says she learned nothing, and the teacher says, "That's impossible," and she replies, "I'm the living proof."
Origins: Adapted from a semi-autobiographical book by a French teacher, who plays a version of himself in the movie.
Opening scene: The back of a man's head – it is the teacher, in a café, downing a fast coffee before going to a teacher orientation for the new school year.
Foreign flavor: You know it's France if students play soccer during lunch. Also: In a café, the teacher smokes a cigarette. A cleaning woman tells him to snuff it out but he persists and no one stops him! Seulement en Paree!
Local reaction: "Exciting from start to finish," said one French reviewer. They loved it at the Cannes film festival: In 2008, it became the first French film to win the top prize in 20 years.
Weird fact: If the movie is to be believed, student representatives sit in on frank faculty discussions of student behavior and academic performance.
Oscar odds: Said to be a front-runner because of its ultra-realism. Then again: the movie's two hours are spent largely in the teacher's confining classroom, highlighting adolescent ennui. Maybe some voters will look for a movie with a plot instead of vignettes highlighting the inability of the modern education system to reach unmotivated students.
–Marc Silver

Departures
In a nutshell: An out-of-work cellist and his young wife move from Tokyo to his hometown of Yamagata, where he finds a new career as a nokanshi --someone who prepares the dead for cremation.
Origins: Inspired by the 1993 novel Coffinman, an autobiographical account of Japanese writer Shinmon Aoki's career as a Buddhist mortician. 
Opening scene: "It's been two months since I left Tokyo to come back home," a narrator intones as a car glides along a snow-swept road. "It's been an awkward time." At their destination, two men in somber suits find a family mourning the loss of an attractive young woman. Midway through the formal rite of washing the body, the younger suit pauses, quizzical. The sorrowful onlookers suddenly look uncomfortable. The mortician's mentor steps in and confirms the discovery: The dead woman was a man.
Foreign flavor: Most audiences will relate to the young couple as just an ordinary pair. But subtle details -- an octopus writhing on the kitchen floor, locals socializing in a sento (communal bathhouse), incense burning in tatami-matted rooms -- are very Japanese.
Local reaction: Japanese critics have called Departures one of the best films of the year, and it has pulled in more than 3 billion yen ($33 million U.S.) so far at the Japanese box office.
Weird fact: In addition to a ritual cleansing, the nokanshi must shave a man's full face and wedge cotton plugs deep into a person's backside to control, uh, seepage.
Oscar odds: It may not have the high profile of The Class or Waltz with Bashir, but Departures is being praised as a simply shot film that offers a candid take on the life of an undertaker. Even if it doesn't win an Oscar, it does offer career possibilities in an era of job woes.
-Victoria Jaggard

Revanche
In a nutshell: This thriller starts off as an unlikely bank caper plotted by Alex, an ex-con who’s a little soft around the edges, and his prostitute girlfriend. As soon as Alex utters the words, “Nothing can go wrong,” be assured that things neither unfold as planned nor as the audience might expect. While trying to escape Vienna’s red-light district they end up in the Austrian countryside altering the mundane lives of an old man and an ordinary couple.
Origins: Written and directed by acclaimed Austrian filmmaker Gotz Speilmann.
Opening scene: A cryptic object unexpectedly drops into the tranquil reflection of trees in a lake. The audience jumped a little. And about two hours into the movie there was a collective a-ha moment when the cause of the placid disturbance is revealed.
Foreign flavor: What’s for dinner: loaf of bread, hunk of cheese, cured meats. How Austrian!
Local reaction: “A meandering first half gives way to a spectacular psychological portrait of the deafening silence of pain and loneliness,” wrote a European film reviewer.
Weird fact: The German word “revanche” can mean either revenge or a second chance. Very apropos.
Oscar odds: Last year’s Oscar winner for best foreign film was Austria’s The Counterfeiters.  Although Revanche has received numerous awards and critical acclaim, a repeat Austrian win is unlikely.
-J.M. McCord

Waltz with Bashir
In a nutshell: Depicted in mesmerizing animation, an Israeli soldier turned filmmaker seeks out compatriots to bridge gaps in his memory about the army's 1982 invasion of Lebanon.
Origins: A documentary of the director's own quest with a few actors filling in for reluctant interviewees.
Opening scene: Snarling dogs race along a rainy city street, snapping directly into the camera under a haunting yellow sky. A friend's recurring dream about the war, it spurs the director's search for answers.
Foreign flavor: Military service and war stories are part of everyone's life experience.
Local reaction: The Israeli newspaper Haaretz wrote "It has to do with everyone who has been in a war here, which is everyone here." In Lebanon, where the movie is technically banned but available via bootleggers and back channels, the film drew one activist's praise for Israeli "courage to revisit events in which they were involved." Others thought it shirked blame for wartime atrocities.
Weird fact: It took nine hours to draw 37 frames—a second and a half of the film.
Oscar odds: Seriously stunning and stunningly serious. Art Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus won a Pulitzer. Bashir can win an Oscar.
-Brad Scriber

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