Congratulations to Deepa Mehta on becoming the first Canadian director whose name isn’t Denys Arcand to get nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Three of Arcand’s films — Decline of the American Empire (1986), Jesus of Montreal (1989) and The Barbarian Invasions (2003) — have been nominated over the years, and on the third try, he got lucky. But until Mehta’s Water (2005) was nominated this morning, no other director of a non-English film produced by Canadians had gotten that far. The funny thing is, in previous years, Water wouldn’t have even qualified, because all the dialogue is in Hindi, a language that is not indigenous to Canada. (Arcand’s films were in French.) But this year, the Academy changed the rules, so…
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