This just changed in 2014, when The Academy finally agreed to acknowledge filmmakers of winning International Feature Films, engraving their name on the Oscar statuette ever since.
Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini directed four Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award–winning motion pictures during his lifetime, a record that remains unmatched as of 2024[update] (if Special Awards are taken into account, then Fellini's record is tied by his countryman Vittorio De Sica).
Academy leader and board member Jean Hersholt argued that "an international award, if properly and carefully administered, would promote a closer relationship between American film craftsmen and those of other countries".
The first foreign language film honored with such an award was the Italian neorealist drama Shoeshine, whose citation read: "the high quality of this motion picture, brought to eloquent life in a country scarred by war, is proof to the world that the creative spirit can triumph over adversity".
In the following years, similar awards were given to seven other films: one from Italy (The Bicycle Thief), two from France (Monsieur Vincent and Forbidden Games), three from Japan (Rashomon, Gate of Hell and Samurai, The Legend of Musashi), as well as a Franco-Italian co-production (The Walls of Malapaga).
[7] The first recipient was the Italian neorealist drama La Strada, which helped establish Federico Fellini as one of the most important European directors.
Films competing in the category must have been first released in the country submitting them during the eligibility period defined by the rules of the academy and must have been exhibited for at least seven consecutive days in a commercial movie theater.
For the 80th Academy Awards, for instance, the release deadline was set on September 30, 2007, whereas the qualifying run for most other categories was extended until December 31, 2007.
Foreign films with dubbed American actors can be nominated, for example, Battle of Neretva (1969) starring Orson Welles and Yul Brynner.
The rule change, however, did not affect the eligibility of non-English speaking American films, which are still disqualified from the category due to their nationality.
While BAFTA Award eligibility requires a commercial release in the United Kingdom, that body does not impose a nationality restriction.
The designation of each country's official submission has to be done by an organization, jury or committee composed of people from the film industry.
This procedure was slightly modified for the 2006 (79th) Academy Awards: a nine-film shortlist was published one week before the official nominations announcement,[24] and a smaller 30-member committee, which included 10 New York City-based Academy members, spent three days viewing the shortlisted films before choosing the five official nominees.
For example, the Oscar statuette won by the Canadian film The Barbarian Invasions (2003) was until recently on display at the Museum of Civilization in Quebec City.
However, producers Dino De Laurentiis and Carlo Ponti were considered to have won the 1956 Foreign Language Film Award given to Fellini's La Strada (1954) because their names explicitly were included in the nomination.
[31] Vox's Alissa Wilkinson argued in 2020 that countries such as China, Russia, and Iran frequently censor their submissions, ignoring films with politically controversial messages.
Because the academy previously had accepted films from other political entities such as Hong Kong, the rejection of Divine Intervention triggered accusations of double standards from pro-Palestinian activists, according to Electronic Intifada.
The nomination also caused protests, this time from pro-Israeli groups in the United States, which objected to the academy's use of the name Palestine on its official website to designate the film's submitting country.
[35] After intense lobbying from pro-Israeli groups, the academy decided to designate Paradise Now as a submission from the Palestinian Authority, a move that was decried by the film's director Hany Abu-Assad.