>career/reputation of a filmmaker.  Does it seem like only particular
>kinds of films are eligible for such a nomination? If you have any
>comments, I'd love to hear them.

You may already know this but the foreign language film award doesn't work
like the other awards.  Each country chooses one film to be considered by
the Academy; there must be available an English-subtitled print for viewing
by members though I'm not sure if that status of release in the US makes a
difference (probably not since many haven't been).  From this "short list"
the Academy then determines the actual nominations, so that the foreign
language nominations have actually been filtered twice: once by the country
and then once by the Academy.  It's no surprise that the best work
(Kiarostami? Hou Hsiao-Hsien?) is ignored as is anything politically or
formally innovative.  The complete list of country submissions for this
year was printed in "Variety"; if you need the info I can get the issue
date fairly easily.
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Lang Thompson
http://www.tcf.ua.edu/wlt4

Coming Soon:  World Cinema Review

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Online resources for film/TV studies may be found at ScreenSite
http://www.tcf.ua.edu/ScreenSite