India's The Good Road out of the Oscar race

Gyan Correa’s much publicized The Good Road is out of the race for the Foreign Language Oscars. Nine features will advance to the next round of voting in the Foreign Language Film category for the 86th Academy Awards. Seventy-six films had originally been considered in the category. Even earlier, The Good Road, Correa’s directorial debut that intertwines three stories in the hostile and remote Kutch in Gujarat, had a bumpy ride – when it invited the wrath of The Lunch Box team, which felt that Correa’s work stood little chance at the Oscars. The films that have been shortlisted are (arranged in alphabetical order by country): Belgium, The Broken Circle Breakdown, Felix van Groeningen, director; Bosnia and Herzegovina, An Episode in the Life of an Iron Picker, Danis Tanovic, director; Cambodia, The Missing Picture, Rithy Panh, director; Denmark, The Hunt, Thomas Vinterberg, director; Germany, Two Lives, Georg Maas, director; Hong Kong, The Grandmaster, Wong Kar-wai, director; Hungary, The Notebook, Janos Szasz, director; Italy, The Great Beauty, Paolo Sorrentino, director; Palestine, Omar, Hany Abu-Assad, director. Foreign Language Film nominations for 2013 are being determined in two phases. The Phase I committee, consisting of several hundred Los Angeles-based Academy members, screened the original submissions in the category between mid-October and 16 December. The group's top six choices, augmented by three additional selections voted by the Academy's Foreign Language Film Award Executive Committee, constitute the shortlist. The shortlist will be winnowed down to the five nominees by specially invited committees in New York and Los Angeles. They will spend Friday, 10 January, through Sunday, 12 January, viewing three films each day and then casting their ballots. The 86th Academy Awards nominations will be announced live on Thursday, 16 January 2014, in the Academy’s Samuel Goldwyn Theater.