Michael Haneke's Cannes winner Amour, the French hit The Intouchables and the Danish costume drama A Royal Affair are among the movies that have been submitted to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for this year's Best Foreign-Language Film category at the Oscars.
With an Oct. 1 deadline approaching for submissions, more than 50 countries have announced their selections so far. The academy invites countries to submit, and each country can only submit one film - meaning that critically applauded films like Jacques Audiard's Rust and Bone and Miguel Gomes' Tabu are out of the running, because their home countries, France and Portugal, opted for something else.
Defending champion Iran, meanwhile, chose Reza Mirkarimi's A Cube of Sugar, then announced that it was instead boy-cotting the Oscars because of the YouTube video Innocence of Muslims.
That trailer for a perhaps-nonexistent film is not eligible for Oscars and entirely unconnected with the academy, but Iran's boycott means that the country will not participate in a competition in which history suggests it had very little chance of advancing.
Iran has been nominated twice in the category's 65-year existence, including last year's winner, A Separation.
The academy still has to determine that each country's selection meets the category's eligibility requirements; typically, one or two submissions are disqualified after being announced, for reasons that have ranged from too much English-language dialogue to not enough creative input from the country of origin.
(Last year's initial Albanian entry, for instance, was disqualified largely because its director was American.)
In October, the academy will begin four months of screenings of the qualifying films - which usually number around 65 - for volunteer voters who make up the "general committee." The six films that score highest with those voters will make it to a shortlist, along with three additional films chosen by a hand-picked executive committee.
In Oscar parlance, these three additional films are called the "saves," and their identities are closely guarded but widely speculated upon.
