Glad to see at least one of the dumb rules in the foreign-language Oscar category has been addressed. The Academy has dropped its requirement that foreign-language nominees must be in an official language of the submitting country—now they can feature any language, as long as it’s not English. Although
this story underplays the significance of the change (it affects at least one—often more—nominations each year), the rule change is a step in the right direction. Now if only we could get rid of the one-movie-per-nation rule and take the national academies out of the picture (Pedro Almódovar resigned from the Spanish academy over, among other reasons, its refusal to nominate his movies for the foreign-film award). I
wrote about the silly rules in this Oscar category years ago in
Slate.
Labels: foreign-language film, movies, oscar, oscars
