Tuesday, October 25, 2005

And It's Official

Oscar has officially announced the Foreign Language Submissions Listthat we've been tracking for a while @ the site.

Please Welcome: Costa Rica, Iraq, and Fiji submitting for the first time.
Bye-Bye: Entries from Nepal, Venezuela, and Uruguay which didn't make the cut.
No Surprise: Greece's Brides which is mostly in English was booted. I called that.
Big Surprise: Michael Haneke's Cannes celebrated thriller Caché (Hidden) starring Juliette Binoche and Daniel Auteuil is not on the list. I assume it must have been disqualified due to one of their strange rules regarding international productions. But its absence is the first I've heard of the film having trouble with the AMPAS committee.

7 comments:

Javier Aldabalde said...

Um... whatever happened to MY COUNTRY there? Me is baffled.

Anonymous said...

Based on the synopses of the films (and external buzz) I am quite interested in:

Argentina
Bangledesh
Canada
Croatia
Fiji (may sound like WR, but it's set in FIJI, one of the most beautiful countries on Earth)
France (always interested in France)
Hong Kong
Japan
Norway
Palestine
Singapore
Spain
Taiwan (er, pornographic musicals are so rare these days)

Thank you so much Nat for doing all that. Great stuff!

-Glenn

Mathew Englander said...

It was not a big surprise that Caché was disqualified. I discussed that a while ago in my blog. The film is in French, not one of Austria’s official languages.

Mathew Englander said...

I have seen eight of the 58 films, and of those I think the best is Finland’s submission, Mother of Mine.

tim r said...

It's got to be L'enfant. It's tremendous, and it's a real oversight that the Dardennes haven't been shortlisted before.

Anonymous said...

But it won Cannes and that's never a good indicator of Oscar's preferences. There was one country's that sounded so rock-solid as a nominee just from the plot, but i can't remember which one.

-Glenn

Javier Aldabalde said...

I want to see all the selections from Scandinavia, as well as some Asian entries (doesn't "The Promise" look like orgasmic or what?)

I can tell you Argentina's "El Aura" is a very excellent film. A worthy-follow up to Bielinsky's "Nine Queens".