Okay. It's time to get down to brass tacks. I'm going to get up on my soapbox and hope that the right Academy members read the column this week, because it's time to re-do the rules of the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar category. Do you know how long it has been since a great film, a truly great film, won in this category? I'm talking about a film made by a genuinely great artist of the cinema, a film for the ages, and not just a perfectly good film, or a film about one of the great world wars. Here's your answer: twenty-five years ago. Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander (1983) was the last great one. That leaves 25 years of pretty good, just OK, forgettable, or flat-out awful winners (mostly forgettable). This year's winner, The Counterfeiters (41 screens) had to be one of the worst movies I saw all year; at it's center is a perfectly good (true) WWII concentration camp story, but it's warped by an entirely inept director, responsible for one of the worst movies I've ever seen, All the Queen's Men (2001). How did it win? How did it get past all the truly great films of 2007?

Call me an optimist, but I'm always hoping for Oscar reform. I've been rather excited about recent rumblings that the Academy is finally, finally considering changing its rules regarding foreign film consideration. I saw one of the new nominees last week, The Counterfeiters, and I have to say that there were at least 20 or 30 other, better foreign language films last year. In fact, I'd have to say that The Counterfeiters is a contender for my worst list of 2008; it takes on an interesting story, but cinematically it's sheer amateur hour. The only reason it got nominated is because it takes place in a concentration camp. I also need to mention that the director, Stefan Ruzowitzky, made one of the worst films I have ever seen, All the Queen's Men (2002), starring Matt LeBlanc and Eddie Izzard as soldiers who go undercover as drag queens in WWII.

Did anyone notice that though La vie en rose earned three nominations (Best Actress, Costume, Makeup) it didn't get nominated for Foreign Language Film? Likewise, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (205 screens) -- filmed almost entirely in French -- was nominated for four awards (Best Director, Editing, Screenplay, Cinematography), but not Best Foreign Film. Why? Diving Bell doesn't count as foreign because it has an American director. Not to mention that each country is only allowed to submit one film, and France's choice, Persepolis (100 screens) was not nominated either. Instead, it was nominated for Best Animated Film! This type of thing happens all the time. In 2002, the foreign film committee rejected the Brazilian film City of God. It was released in 2003 to great critical acclaim and success, and was nominated the following year for four Oscars in other categories. In 2000, Taiwan chose to submit the hit Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, rather than arguably the greatest film of the past decade, Edward Yang's Yi Yi. Why couldn't both be nominated?

The Taiwanese-born filmmaker Edward Yang, who passed away this past June at the age of 59, stood on the verge of possibly revitalizing cinema. In 2002, Sight & Sound magazine -- disappointed with the results of its every-ten-years poll of the all-time great films, conducted a new poll consisting exclusively of films made in the past 25 years, from 1978 to 2002. The entire top ten was made up of older films from the 1970s and 1980s, except for Scorsese's GoodFellas (1990), Wong Kar-wai's Chungking Express (1994) and Yang's Yi Yi (2000). Yang's film was the only one from the 21st century to make the list, and since it was the only one of Yang's films to receive theatrical distribution in the West, that means that it's the only one that a majority of the voters had ever seen.

Yang completed only seven feature films and one short "segment" in his all-too brief career, and I've only managed to see two of them. Yi Yi topped my list of the year's best films the year I saw it -- and stands a good chance to do the same on my upcoming best-of-the-decade list. I also managed to see A Brighter Summer Day (1991), in its full four-hour version, thanks to a website called www.superhappyfun.com that sells a DVD-R dupe of an old laserdisc for only $16. The picture is scratched and the subtitles leave a bit to be desired, but this film is even more complex and intriguing than Yi Yi. Set over the course of most of a year in 1961, A Brighter Summer Day deals with a subculture of Mainland Chinese who fled to Taiwan after the victory of the Chinese Communists in 1949. A printed introduction explains that their children are now living in a state of uncertainty and have taken to forming street gangs for a sense of safety and control.

• Claude Brosset (1943-2007) - French actor who appears opposite Jean Paul Belmondo in L'Alpagueur, Les Corps de mon Ennemi, Flic ou Voyou and Le Marginal. He also appears in George Roy Hill's A Little Romance, Costa-Gavras' Un Homme de Trop and Tavernier's Capitaine Conan and L.627. He died June 25 in Pontoise, Val d'Oise, France. (IMDb.com)
• Leo Burmester (1944-2007) - Actor who who played 'Catfish' in The Abyss (pictured). He also appears in Lone Star, The Legend of Zorro, The Last Temptation of Christ, A Perfect World and The Devil's Advocate. He died of leukemia June 28. (Playbill)
• Brian Finch (1936-2007) - British screenwriter, mostly for television (Coronation Street), who wrote 2005's Heidi, which featured Max Von Sydow. He died June 27. (The Independent)
• Anita Guha (?-2007) - Indian actress who portrayed Hindu goddesses in Sampoorna Ramayana, Tulsi Vivah and Krishna-Krishna. She also starred as the title character in the hit film Jai Santoshi Maa. She died of heart failure June 20, in Mumbai. (Variety)
• William Hutt (1920-2007) - Canadian actor who appears in Norman Jewison's The Statement and John Frankenheimer's The Fixer. He also provided his voice for the sci-fi pic The Shape of Things to Come and multiple documentaries. He died of leukemia June 27, in Stratford, Ontario. (Variety)