Wunderbar!

Ever sensitive to the complexities of international film financing, and dedicated to maintaining a level playing field for its prestigious awards ... no, I'm just kidding.

The AP reports that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has finally changed the qualification requirements for its foreign-language film award, dropping the stipulation that a film's dialogue be spoken primarily in the language of its submitting country.

One need only to consider the disqualification of Krzysztof Kieslowski's magnificent "Three Colors" trilogy to see how embarrassing this little speed bump has been to the Academy in the past. Of course, the members could just nominate a given film for Best Picture, and be done with it ... but that doesn't happen very often, and when it does, it's usually a mass-market hit like "Life is Beautiful" or "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" that's also been nominated for the foreign-language award, and has to settle for winning that one.

Then again, that's not always a bad thing; imagine how unbearable Roberto Benigni would be today if he'd taken the top prize on that awful night.

Curiously, the example put forth by in the AP piece to illustrate the issue is the case of "Private", an Italian-produced drama set in a Palestinian home, with dialogue in Hebrew and Arabic.

I'd have gone with Michael Haneke's "Cache", myself; not only are more people likely to have seen it, but it's a film that actually was last year's best foreign-language film, and at the very least deserved the larger exposure a nomination would have afforded it.

But then, I'm a snob ...

Technorati tags: Movies, Oscars, Subtitles, Roberto Benigni is the Devil