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From Oscar's point of view, 2002 was a banner year for international cinema. When the five Best Foreign Language Film nominees are announced this week, they'll be chosen from a record 54 movies from as many countries. The list includes strong entries from such cinematic hotbeds as France and Iran, as well as first-time entries from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Chad. But some of the world's best films aren't even in the running. A thicket of obscure, often contradictory Academy rules have kept critical and box office favorites from being considered. The strict and sometimes nonsensical criteria raise doubts about the Academy's world view. And politics aside, this year's nominees simply don't represent the best the world has to offer.

The trouble started last December, when Palestine's first-ever contender, the award-winning dramatic comedy Divine Intervention, was rejected by the Academy, reportedly because it doesn't recognize Palestine as a nation. An uproar followed, but Oscar may have gotten a bum rap. While the Academy does use membership in the U.N. as a guide for eligibility, Divine Intervention was never officially submitted.

Call it a technical knockout. Regulations state that all films must be nominated by a recognized national committee made up of a group of impartial filmmakers. Palestine, lacking many of the trappings of a nation, also lacks any such committee. "We were going to construct a committee for the purpose of submitting the film, but we never got that far," says the film's director, Elia Suleiman. "At least now the academy might have to re-evaluate the logistics of how they reject or accept films."

The Academy's Rule 14 says a Best Foreign Film entry's "dialogue track must be predominantly in a language of the country of origin except when the story mandates that an additional non-English language be predominant." That rule was used to reject the U.K.'s original submission, Asif Kapadia's The Warrior, which is in Hindi. A Western take on a Japanese fable transplanted to India, Kapadia's directorial debut earned rave reviews and three nominations at this year's BAFTA awards. The film has a second-generation British director, a British screenwriter and British backers — yet was considered insufficiently British, since it was shot in India with Indian actors speaking Hindi. "I'm appalled," says The Warrior producer Bertrand Faivre. "The Academy is just ignorant about how the world is changing." The U.K. instead submitted Welsh-language Eldra — though at least twice as many people in the U.K. speak Hindi as speak Welsh.

Producer Mark Johnson, chairman of the Academy's Foreign Language Film Award Committee, says his group does get the big picture. "We take into account the country submitting it, what percent of the creative talent comes from that country and whether the film is thematically reflective of that country," he says. "We have to be extra careful about our rules as movies become more international and it becomes harder to ascribe nationality." If anything, Johnson says, the committee has been lax this year. It accepted Afghanistan's Fire Dancer, a film set in New York and featuring an Afghan-American cast. "It's debatable whether Afghanistan actually qualified," says Johnson. "But given everything else going on in the country, it would be hard not to include the film."

Nice to root for the underdog, but what about countries that produced several great films this year? Academy rules allow only one film per country per year, forcing prolific nations to make painful choices; Mexico's Y Tu Mamá También and Spain's Talk to Her were not submitted. "The impulse of the Academy is to be as inclusive as possible," says executive director Bruce Davis. "Ideally every picture in every country [would be] eligible. We would then decide what the best films of the year were and if all five came from Yugoslavia, so be it. Clearly that's impractical."

Maybe the problem is the category. With international filmmakers rivaling Hollywood for quality and quantity, is it still relevant? "For a large number of films made outside Hollywood, the Foreign Language Film Award is the only way they get publicity," says Catherine Grant, lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Kent in Canterbury, England. "There is a level of unfairness in the criteria, but in terms of getting films out there, the Oscar is very useful." And until the Academy screens the world's work as fully as it does America's, Oscar will never see the whole picture.

• JUMANA FAROUKY/London
• Why it's so hard for foreign-language films to qualify for the Oscars