'The Good Road' out of Oscar race

Gyan Correa’s Gujarati film “The Good Road” is out of the best foreign film Oscar race after it failed to qualify in the Academy’s latest shortlist.

Nine films will advance to the next round of voting in the category for the 86th Academy Awards out of 76 films that had qualified in the category.

The movie’s selection to represent India at the Oscars had created a lot of controversy as it was chosen over popular titles like “The Lunchbox”, “Ship of Theseus” and “Bhaag Milkha Bhaag”.

Karan Johar, Anurag Kashyap, who were the producers behind “The Lunchbox” and the film’s director Ritesh Batra had openly slammed the Oscar committee in India for passing over their film for “The Good Road”.

The films that have made it to the Oscar shortlist in the category include “An Episode in the Life of an Iron Picker”, a Bosnian and Herzegovinan film by “No Man’s Land” director Danis Tanovic, who has shot a film in India with Emraan Hashmi.

Belgium’s entry “The Broken Circle Breakdown” by Felix van Groeningen is in the list. So is Denmark’s critically acclaimed drama “The Hunt”. Directed by Thomas Vinterberg, the film, about a man wrongly accused of child molestation, generated a lot of buzz at Cannes this May.

Cambodia’s “The Missing Picture” by Rithy Panh has made it to the list; so has Germany’s “Two Lives” by Georg Maas.

Master-director Wong Kar-wai’s “The Grandmaster”, a historical martial-arts movie about Bruce Lee’s teacher Ip Man is in the list.

Hungary’s “The Notebook” by Janos Szasz and Italy’s “The Great Beauty”, another festival favourite, directed by Paolo Sorrentino, is in the list while from Palestine, the Academy has selected “Omar” by Hany Abu-Assad.

The most surprising snub was the exclusion of Iranian director Asghar Farhadi’s “The Past” as it was being considered as a front-runner after a very positive festival run. Farahadi’s 2012 film “A Separation” had won Iran its first Oscar. The shortlist will be winnowed down to the five nominees by specially invited committees in New York and Los Angeles on January 10 and 12.