Academy Bends on Foreign Entries : Relaxing Oscar Rules Allows in ‘Papaya,’ ‘Banquet,’ ‘Concubine’

Relaxing its new qualifying guidelines for best foreign-language film Oscar consideration, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences disclosed Friday that it has accepted three widely acclaimed movies that would not have otherwise made the cut.

Vietnam’s “The Scent of Green Papaya,” the debut film of director Tran Anh Hung and winner of this year’s Camera d’Or at Cannes, will join the Taiwanese entry “The Wedding Banquet (winner of the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival) and Hong Kong’s “Farewell My Concubine” (co-winner of the top Palm d’Or prize at Cannes) on the list of 30 films from which the top five nominees will be selected. The academy also revealed that “Blue,” winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, has been rejected since it was shot in French rather than Polish--the language of the submitting country.

The academy’s guidelines, made public in August, suggest that no foreign-language film is eligible for an Oscar unless three conditions are met. Of the producer, director and writer, two should be from the country submitting the film. That country should be represented in three of the six main creative areas--art director, cinematographer, costume designer, editor, sound mixer, music composer. Finally, actors from the submitting country should constitute a “significant element” of the film.

“The standards are complex, antiquated and senseless,” maintains Jeff Lipsky, co-founder of October Films, which is distributing “Cronos,” a Mexican entry unaffected by the new guidelines. “Yet the academy won’t candidly admit that anything is wrong with any part of the Oscar process.”

Adds Ray Price, vice president of First Look Pictures, the U.S. distributor of “Scent”: “I empathize with the academy’s effort to discourage films from ‘shopping nationalities’--if country A doesn’t submit it, they check out country B. But in trying to define ethnic origin, the criteria may be misleading and create problems entirely different from the intent.”

Arthur Hiller, president of the academy, emphasizes that these criteria are not “edicts.” Judgments will be made on a case-by-case basis by the 10-person executive committee and announced at the end of the month. Eligible films will then be evaluated by the 300 to 400 members of the screening committee to determine the five nominees.

“Foreign films pose particular problems and we’re trying to be as flexible as possible,” Hiller says. “We want to recognize the best filmmaking wherever we can find it, but there’s no perfect way.”

Maybe so, retort the critics. But criteria such as these are out of sync with the realities of the international marketplace. Co-productions are a fact of life--particularly in a united Europe and developing countries without the deep pockets to finance films on their own. In fact, Eurimage, a division of the European Economic Community, partially funds movies only if a minimum of three different partners participate.

The academy rules are “unjust and a bit bizarre, a deterrent to free trade,” claimed “Scent” producer Christophe Rossignon prior to the acceptance of his film last week. The movie, a homage to Vietnam on the part of the director, who left the country in 1975, started shooting in Vietnam but was forced to move to a French soundstage because of insufficient technical expertise in the local film industry. Because this movie, like “Concubine” and “Wedding Banquet,” was shot on location, it was that much harder to satisfy the stipulation that half the creative team should come from the country of origin.

“The Vietnamese government recognizes this film as purely Vietnamese,” says Rossignon, on the phone from Paris. “All the actors are Vietnamese. It’s the first film they’ve shown in the Western world that depicts the country as it truly is, instead of as ‘The Lover’ and ‘Indochine’ did, from a French vantage point. In determining a movie’s nationality, what’s important is the artistic vision conveyed and the country of the writer and director--not the nationality of the art director and technicians.”

Rosine Handelman, the representative for Marin Karmitz, a producer of “Blue,” finds the situation equally off-putting. The Polish entry, she observes, was made by Krzysztof Kieslowski, one of the country’s leading directors, co-produced by a Pole, and set to music by a Pole. Yet it was penalized for shooting in France with a French crew and actors as the story line mandated.

“Someone said to me that it’s like refusing to recognize the work of Picasso--an artist of Spanish origin--because he didn’t paint on Spanish canvas with Spanish paint,” she says.

Bruce Davis, executive director of the academy, finds her argument a weak one. “Unlike the director’s ‘The Double Life of Veronique,’ ‘Blue’ has no significant Polish element,” he insists. “It’s like Roman Polanski coming over here to make ‘Chinatown’ and calling it a ‘French’ film. Still, the foreign-language film executive committee is made up of filmmakers, not martinets. Fifteen of the countries submitted a rationale with their entry forms and, in the majority of cases, there are compensating factors.”

Economics is one. Taiwanese director Ang Lee’s “The Wedding Banquet,” with a budget of under $1 million, could hardly be expected to transport a creative team to New York, where the film was shot. An American crew, moreover, is far better able to scout locations, speak the language and negotiate with local officials than one imported from abroad.

“The cost of flying a creative team from a Second or Third World country, housing and feeding them in New York would have been prohibitive,” says James Schamus, a co-producer of the movie--a social comedy about a marriage of convenience between a gay Taiwanese man living in the U.S. and his beautiful tenant. “The movie, the biggest box-office hit Taiwan has produced, is an allegory about the lack of a power balance between Taiwan and the U.S.--how hard it is for the lead character to take a place at the table. It would be too bad if that applied to the Oscars too.”

Politics also skews the foreign-language film selection process. Two years ago, Germany refused to submit “Europa, Europa”--the odds-on Oscar favorite about a Jewish teen masquerading as a Gentile soldier to survive the Holocaust. This summer, China banned Chen Kaige’s “Farewell My Concubine”--a love story about two male actors and a prostitute--in part because of scenes critical of the Cultural Revolution. China agreed to show it, albeit in censored form, only when international protests threatened the country’s chances of landing the 2000 Olympic Games. When it came to selecting an Oscar entry, however, Chinese officials went with the little-known “The Phoenix Banjo.” “Concubine,” a Hong Kong-financed project based on a book by a Hong Kong writer, was submitted by that country.

Michael Barker, co-president of Sony Pictures Classics, which is distributing the French entry “Germinal,” downplays the ruckus. “There will always be controversy,” he says. “And those leading the way are the American distributors such as Miramax and (the Samuel) Goldwyn (Company), who have a monetary interest in the results. An Oscar nomination means a lot commercially so there’s a lot of ‘sour grapes’ involved. This is not to say that the process shouldn’t be liberalized, though. There are a lot of terrific films out there, which, if excluded, would diminish the stature of the award.”

Such problems that exist, says October Films Lipsky, are easily remedied. “The solution is simple, self-evident and democratic,” he says. “Let foreign films qualify in the same manner as our English-language films: Have the academy select the best one among those that have had a seven-day run in the U.S. during the previous calendar year.”

The academy’s Davis calls the proposal manageable, but discriminatory against those “wonderful, small” films without the profile and financial clout to line up an American distributor. Still, he admits, there’s room for improvement.

“The issue of which country is responsible for a film is a lot cloudier than in the post-World War II period when the rules were first set up,” he says. “If two countries have a hand in a movie, the project could qualify for either one. Three or more, and it’s likely that it will fall through the cracks because of insufficient input from any one country. The committee is looking at this trend with apprehension, trying to find a mechanism for accepting those ‘films without a country.’ We’ve been trying to adapt to a changing universe--and the universe is constantly changing.”