KEY POINTS:
Oscar has stirred up some international intrigue.
Some of 2007's most acclaimed international films will not be competing for the foreign-language prize at the Academy Awards next month.
Among the rejected movies are the Romanian abortion drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, which won the top
Palme d'Or prize at the Cannes Film Festival last year, and the animated French movie Persepolis, which won a jury prize at Cannes.
Instead, organisers said yesterday that films including the Holocaust-related dramas The Counterfeiters from Austria and Katyn from Poland will compete for the Oscar on February 24.
Others to miss out were Brazil's The Year My Parents Went on Vacation, Canada's Days of Darkness, Italy's The Unknown and Serbia's The Trap.
But at least they got that far. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days and Persepolis failed to survive the first culling, as did the Spanish horror film The Orphanage, one of the few submissions that has actually played in US movie theatres.
The omission of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days was "one of the stupidest things that I've ever seen happen," said Rolling Stone critic Peter Travers.
Persepolis co-director Marjane Satrapi said she lost hope of getting any Oscar attention after the foreign-language snub and was relieved that her coming-of-age story set against the Iranian revolution was noted for animated picture.
Others were rejected long ago. The Academy disqualified Israel's original submission, The Band's Visit, because there was too much English dialogue. It also decreed that Ang Lee's Lust, Caution did not have enough Taiwanese talent.
France opted for Persepolis over such strong entrants as The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and La Vie en Rose.
Diving Bell was nominated in four categories, including best director for American artist Julian Schnabel, while La Vie en Rose picked up three nominations.
Director Stefan Ruzowitzky's The Counterfeiters is the true story of concentration camp prisoners forced to print millions of dollars' worth of phony currency as part of a Nazi scheme to ruin Allied economies.
Beaufort, from director Joseph Cedar, revolves around the Israeli army's 2000 evacuation of the historic stone fortress of the same name in southern Lebanon.
Director Sergei Bodrov's Mongol recounts the early life of Genghis Khan, with the infamous conqueror played by Japanese actor Tadanobu Asano.
Katyn, a box-office smash from Poland's most famous director, Andrzej Wajda, revolves around the massacre of the Polish officer corps by the Soviets in 1940.
12, from Nikita Mikhalkov, was inspired by the 1957 drama 12 Angry Men.
- REUTERS