I didn’t do so badly picking the foreign selections. Sony Pictures Classics’s Michael Barker warned me to expect Paul Verhoeven’s Black Book, a movie I suspect will not make the final five, on the short list. My reason: it’s offensive, basically. It’s a commercially entertaining movie about the Holocaust that makes any number of errors in judgment. I went to see it because there were so many divergent views on it out of Toronto. People I respect liked it a lot. But a handsome Nazi as a leading man? (Even if he is played by gorgeous Lives of Others star Sebastian Koch, who was wandering around the Globes parties last night.) I don’t think so. The SPC movie that didn’t make it was Zhang Yimou’s Curse of the Golden Flower, which may still turn up in the costume design category.

So here’s the final nine, from my story in THR:

Nine of 61 films that originally qualified for consideration by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for the foreign-language film Oscar have advanced to the final voting phase. The rules for the category changed this year. Instead of several hundred members of the foreign-language film committee selecting the five nominees, this year — during what the Academy calls Phase I — their ballots selected nine finalists for nomination.

A Phase II committee of 30, comprised of 10 randomly selected members of the larger group and two 10-member contingents from New York and Los Angeles, will choose the final five nominees.
The films are Algeria’s Days of Glory, directed by Rachid Bouchareb (distributed by the Weinstein Co.); Canada’s Water, by Deepa Mehta (Fox Searchlight); Denmark’s After the Wedding, by Susanne Bier (IFC Films); France’s Avenue Montaigne, by Daniele Thompson (ThinkFilm); Germany’s The Lives of Others, by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (Sony Pictures Classics); Mexico’s Pan’s Labyrinth, by Guillermo del Toro (Picturehouse); the Netherlands’ Black Book, by Paul Verhoeven (SPC); Spain’s Volver, directed by Pedro Almodovar (SPC); and Switzerland’s Vitus, by Fredi M. Murer (SPC).

Screenings for Phase II will be held Friday-Sunday in New York and Los Angeles. The nominations for the 79th Annual Academy Awards will be announced Tuesday at 5:30 a.m. PST. The Oscars will be held Feb. 25 at the Kodak Theatre at Hollywood & Highland.