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Oscar Watch: Kite Runner, Diving Bell and Butterfly Won't Enter Foreign Race
There's no question that Khaled Hosseini's Afghanistan novel The Kite Runner, a bestseller and book group favorite, is a natural for the cinema. For some reason Paramount Vantage is not taking the conventional fall festival route with this DreamWorks movie directed by Marc Forster (Finding Neverland). However, Vantage insists they will launch it in a cool and special way.
This trailer confirms the early word I have on the father-son (melo)drama: that it is a crowd-pleaser/tearjerker, even in a foreign language (Dari). A critics' picture? That's another question, and Kite Runner's Oscar hopes will hang on that.
That's because it won't be submitted by any country for foreign Oscar consideration. Nor, by the way, will Cannes best-director winner Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which should fare better with stateside critics and cinephiles than it did in France, where Schnabel had the temerity to direct a beloved French book in French. Granted, no matter how artfully done, a story about a paralyzed man who can't speak is going to be a tough sell.
In France, Diving Bell grossed some $2.4 million (according to EDI, 302,487 admissions) as compared to La Vie En Rose, a huge hit at $41 million. France's official Oscar submission will be something homegrown like the period romance Moliere, which grossed $9 million.
In any case, both Kite Runner and Diving Bell are ineligible because they are considered American productions with foreign elements. The Academy rules dictate that two out of three categories-- writer, director and producer--must be from the submitting country. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association does not have such a rule, which is how Mel Gibson's Apocalypto and Clint Eastwood's Letters from Iwo Jima were foreign-language nominees; Iwo Jima actually won.
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