As the years go by, Academy Awards are starting to assume less and less merit by film buffs. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ name has become synonymous with bling and studio politics, if not outright payola. But, this year, the Academy did a lot to redeem its reputation as a standard-bearer for excellence by awarding Best Foreign Language Film to The Lives of Others. Renters of this German thriller-due out on DVD and Blu-Ray on August 21-will witness what, with any luck, could prove to be the spark to light a renaissance of great cinema.

Set against the putrid greens and grays of East Berlin, 1984 (cf. George Orwell’s dystopia), Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s film centers around "Operation Lazlo," a surveillance operation that the Stasi perform on the German Democratic Republic’s foremost playwright Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) and his girlfriend Christa-Maria Sieland, the GDR’s leading actress, played by the incomparable Martina Gedeck (The Good Shepherd). The Stasi were the GDR’s secret police. With 100,000 officers and over 200,000 informants, they were once well on their way to meeting their expressed goal "to know everything" about everyone. By 1984, only a few state favorites were free from threat of Stasi surveillance.

At the beginning of the film, Georg Dreyman enjoys such freedom, but Minister of Culture Bruno Kempf (Thomas Thieme) rescinds it when his lust for Christa-Maria Sieland starts to consume his every word and deed. Kempf orders Lieutenant Anton Gubritz (Ulrich Tuker), a careerist Stasi, to find any speck of dirt he can to put the dramatist behind bars and out of his path to the leading lady. Meantime, when Christa doesn’t turn up for their compulsory rendezvouses, Kempf makes a sport of hunting her down in his limo and raping her in the backseat. With the help of black-market Diazepam, Christa routinely acquiesces to his assaults in order to save herself from the omnipresent Blacklist, which claimed the career, and later the life, of Albert Jerska (Volkmar Kleinert), a director friend of her and Dreyman.

Gubritz orders Captain Wiesler (Ulrich Muhe) to go into Dreyman’s apartment when no one’s there and wire it from stem to stern. Wiesler undertakes this assignment with the same gusto with which he’s always supported the state. Wiesler then sets up camp in an empty attic in the building, scrutinizing every sound emanating from within the apartment. Spying on Dreyman’s 40th birthday party, he hears Dreyman’s friend Paul Hauser (Hans Uwe-Bauer) denouncing the Stasi and the state, but he also hears Dreyman defending the socialist government and the good it’s done his career. This all changes, however, when Dreyman receives word that Jerska has hanged himself after being seven years on the GDR’s Blacklist with no hope of work or reprieve. In attempt to work through his grief and bring the GDR to justice for his friend’s death, Dreyman takes a pseudonym and writes "One Who Made It to the Other Side," an exposé on how the GDR has ceased keeping record of suicides since 1977, the year it discovered that its suicide rate was among the highest in Europe, second only to Hungary.

Dreyman’s solitary confinement is as good as secured. Weisler can swoop down from the attic at any moment. But, by now, Wiesler has uncovered the depths of Dreyman’s nobility and of his love for Christa. This melts the icy heart of the lonely authoritarian who only finds approximations of love by visiting prostitutes, as portrayed in a heart-rending scene toward the middle of the film. Though he once resented that Dreyman was the toast of the GDR’s cultural elite, he now covertly aids and abets Dreyman’s henchmen in smuggling the article across the West German border by falsifying surveillance records to cover up this and many other acts that could qualify as crimes against the state. Wiesler has also come to understand that, far from being "the shield and sword" of communist ideals, his Stasi superiors are as acquisitive as the capitalists they condemn.

When Dreyman’s account of East German suicides makes the cover of Der Spiegel, the Stasis launch a sting against him. And, when Christa spurns Kempf for the last time, the consequences are tragic beyond tears. The film then takes us to 1991, two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. By now, Dreyman has stopped writing plays. He runs into Kempf, who is the same sanctimonious bureaucrat outside of communism that he was inside of it. Now, however, Kempf can only bait Dreyman with nostalgia, asking him what kind of writer he’ll ever be in the reunified Germany, where there’s "nothing to rebel against." The movie ends on a joyous note, though, after Dreyman discovers that he’d had a guardian in the room upstairs the whole time, keeping him out of the Stasi’s reach. From there, Dreyman recaptures his muse and begins a whole new period of writing.

In his feature film debut, the enviably young writer and director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (b. 1973) recreates Communist East Berlin in painstaking detail, right up to the perennially overcast sky. However, the film’s exquisite cinematography, absorbing pace and all-around perfect performances keep it from foundering in the lugubrious seas of a lot of German cinema. Tack it on to your own NetFlix queue. You won’t be disappointed.