Eligibility
Unlike other Academy Awards, the Foreign Language Film Award does not require films to be released in the United States in order to be eligible for competition. Films competing in the Foreign Language Film category must have been first released in the country submitting them during the eligibility period defined by the rules of the Academy, and must have been exhibited for at least seven consecutive days in a commercial movie theater. The eligibility period for the Foreign Language Film category differs from that required for most other categories: the awards year defined for the Foreign Language Film category usually begins and ends before the ordinary awards year, which corresponds to an exact calendar year. For the 80th Academy Awards, for instance, the release deadline for the Foreign Language Film category was set on September 30, 2007, whereas the qualifying run for most other categories extended till December 31, 2007.
Although the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film is commonly referred to simply as the Foreign Film Oscar in newspaper articles and on the Internet, such a designation is misleading, since a film's nationality matters much less than its language. Although a film has to be "foreign" (i.e. non-American) in order to be nominated for the Award, it also has to be in a language other than English. Foreign films where the majority of the dialogue is in English cannot qualify for the Foreign Language Film Award, and the Academy has usually applied this requirement very seriously by disqualifying films containing too much English dialogue, the most recent case being that of the Israeli film The Band's Visit (2007). Despite the basic importance of the foreign language requirement, a completely dialogueless film such as Le Bal (1983) was still able to get nominated in the Foreign Language Film category.
Another disqualifying factor is a film's television or Internet transmission prior to its theatrical release, hence the Academy's rejection of the Dutch film Bluebird (2004). A film may also be refused if its submitting country has exercised insufficient artistic control over it. Several films have been declared ineligible by the Academy for the latter reason, the most recent of which is Lust, Caution (2007), Taiwan's entry for the 80th Academy Awards. The disqualifications, however, generally take place in the pre-nomination stage, with the exception of A Place in the World (1992), Uruguay's entry for the 65th Academy Awards, which was disqualified because of insufficient Uruguayan artistic control after having secured a nomination. It is the only film so far to have been declared ineligible and removed from the final ballot after having been nominated for the Foreign Language Film Award.
Since the 2006 (79th) Academy Awards, submitted films no longer have to be in an official language of the submitting country. This requirement had previously prevented countries from submitting films where the majority of the dialogue was spoken in a language that was non-native to the submitting country, and the Academy's executive director explicitly cited as a reason for the rule change the case of the Italian film Private (2004), which was disqualified simply because its main spoken languages were Arabic and Hebrew, neither of which are indigenous languages of Italy. This rule change enabled a country like Canada to receive a nomination for a Hindi-language film, Water. Previously, Canada had been nominated for French-language films only, since films shot in Canada's other official language (English) were ineligible for consideration for the Foreign Language Film category. Before the rule change, Canada submitted one film in a different language—Atanarjuat (2001), shot in Inuktitut. That language, one of the country's aboriginal languages, is not official throughout Canada, but was (and still is) official in Nunavut and the Northwest Territories. Atanarjuat did not earn a nomination. The rule change, however, did not affect the eligibility of non-English speaking American films, which are still disqualified from the Foreign Language Film category due to their nationality. Because of this, a Japanese-language film like Letters from Iwo Jima (2006) or a Mayan-language film like Apocalypto (2006) were unable to compete for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, even though they were both nominated for (and, in the case of Letters from Iwo Jima, won) the Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film, which does not have similar nationality restrictions. The nationality restrictions also differ from the practice of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) for their analogous award for Best Film Not in the English Language. While BAFTA Award eligibility requires a commercial release in the United Kingdom, that body does not impose a nationality restriction.
As known, all films produced inside the United States have been ineligible for consideration for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film regardless of the language of their dialogue track. This fact also included films produced in U.S. overseas possessions. However, Puerto Rico is an unincorporated territory of the United States and used to be eligible due to Puerto Ricans having had American citizenship since 1917. Their best success in this award was receiving a nomination for Santiago, the Story of his New Life (1989). However, as of 2011, the Academy had decided not to allow submissions from the territory anymore.
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