The Academy of Motion Pictures has rejected a second entry for next year’s Oscar award for Best International Film.
The movie ‘Joy’ was written and directed by Austria Filmmaker Sudabeh Mortezai and tells the story about Nigerian sex workers in Vienna.
According to the Academy, the movie was rejected because it has too much dialogue in English.
“As we do every year, the Academy is in the process of reviewing the films submitted for the International Feature Film category to determine whether they meet our eligibility rules. The film Joy, submitted by Austria, was just reviewed and is ineligible because only 33% of the dialogue is non-English,” a statement from the Academy stated.
Last week the Academy tuned down Nigeria’s own submission, Lionheart, for the same reason.
The rejections come in the year when the Academy re-named the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar award to Best International Film for “films that are not in the English language”.
