THE 66th ACADEMY AWARD NOMINATIONS : When Rules Were Made to Be Broken : Foreign films: For this year’s nominees, the academy relaxed its stipulation that at least half the creative team should come from the country of origin.

Three films nominated by Asian countries dominated the academy’s foreign-language category Wednesday, and none of them would have been eligible for consideration had the organization not decided to bend its new guidelines this year.

One of the nominees--Taiwan’s “The Wedding Banquet”--was shot in New York by a New York director and crew. Vietnam’s “The Scent of Green Papaya” was filmed on a French sound stage. The controversial “Farewell My Concubine” was not nominated by China, where it was filmed, but by Hong Kong, where it was financed.

In all three cases, the academy had to relax its stipulation that at least half the creative team should come from the country of origin.

The selections were rife with other paradoxes. “Belle Epoque,” a comedy set in 1930 and centered around a young man’s pursuit of four sisters, is Spanish despite its French title. “ ‘Belle Epoque’ has the flavor of a lost paradise, something in the past that you’d like to revisit,” said director Fernando Trueba, adding that the film is a homage to French director Jean Renoir.

The mostly English-speaking United Kingdom was represented among the foreign-language nominees with a Welsh film, “Hedd Wyn,” directed by Paul Turner. A World War I drama, the movie is the only one among the five that has yet to find a U.S. distributor.

Tom Rothman, president of worldwide production for the Samuel Goldwyn Co., distributor of “The Wedding Banquet,” said the strong showing by Asian films is not a fluke.

“We’re seeing a flowering of Asian cinema,” he said. “It represents a growth, not just in movie making opportunities but in the receptivity of American audiences to those pictures.” Later this year, Goldwyn will release “Eat Drink Man Woman,” the next film from Ang Lee, director of “Wedding Banquet,” and “To Live,” a new film from Zhang Yimou, a two-time previous Oscar nominee.

Said “Farewell My Concubine” director Chen Kaige in a statement: “I’m so pleased that three of the five nominees in my category are directed by Asian filmmakers.”

In another unusual development, two of the nominated films center around homosexual characters. “The Wedding Banquet,” the top-grossing film in Taiwan’s history, tells the story of a gay man who marries his female tenant in order to hide his homosexuality from his visiting parents. The epic “Farewell My Concubine,” based on a Hong Kong book, traces the 50-year relationship between two male Peking Opera stars.

Rothman said the gay themes are a further sign of the maturing cinema in what are “traditionally thought of as very restrictive societies.”

Traditional Vietnamese culture is the subject of “Papaya,” that country’s first Oscar entry. Set in the 1950s, the movie was shot outside Paris because there is virtually no film industry in Vietnam.