BY Hollywood Today Newsmagazine

The Diving Bell And The Butterfly” was named Best Foreign Language Film by Golden Globe voters but the French language drama is nowhere to be seen on the list of nine nominees for the foreign language Oscar this year, as revealed Tuesday by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences.

Another popular foreign language film “The Kite Runner,” based on a first novel by Afghan American author Khaled Hosseini, doesn’t make the list either. Nor did either film make the list of 63 movies published earlier by the Academy, listing the official entrants.

That is because both are viewed under Academy rules as American productions with foreign elements. Two of three elements (writer, director or producer) must be from the submitting country. And that is the other thing – the movie must be nominated by the official organization in that country, and France chose “Persepolis,” an animated drama set in Iran by directors Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud. That didn’t make the final list of nine either.

The Academy Awards are sort of like electoral voting in the American presidential race. Every movie doesn’t have an equal chance. It must be chosen by a country as its single representative movie, its best work put forward, for that year.

The Globes don’t have the same system. The international journalists who are members nominate whatever they want, as long as it is in a foreign tongue, which is how the award nominations have gone to Mel Gibson’s “Apocalypto” and Clint Eastwood’s “Letters from Iwo Jima,” which won.

Now, “The Diving Bell and The Butterfly” has also won the Globe, but is shut out by Oscar.

The voting on the best foreign language movie occurs in two phases. First, several hundred members of the movie Academy in Los Angeles, view 63 eligible films and vote on a short list of nine pictures that remain contenders.

Next, ten random members of that group of voters are selected, and joined by ten-member panels of Academy members in New York and Los Angeles, who view the nine short-listed films and pick the five final nominees.

Oscar nominations come out Tuesday, Jan. 22. The big show is scheduled for Sunday, Feb. 24 on ABC, and the network and producers have declared repeatedly that the show will go on, no matter what the status of the writers strike.

Here are the nine films still in the running for Best Foreign Language Oscar, listed in alphabetical order by country: Austria, “The Counterfeiters,” Stefan Ruzowitzky, Director; Brazil, “The Year My Parents Went on Vacation,” Cao Hamburger, Director; Canada, “Days of Darkness,” Denys Arcand, Director; Israel, “Beaufort,” Joseph Cedar, Director; Italy, “The Unknown,” Giuseppe Tornatore, Director; Kazakhstan, “Mongol,” Sergei Bodrov, Director; Poland, “Katyn,” Andrzej Wajda, Director; Russia, “12,” Nikita Mikhalkov, Director and Serbia, “The Trap,” Srdan Golubovic, Director

----------------------------------------------------------------------