Lee's Lust Loses Oscar Luster - 李安

Josh Grossberg Thu Oct 18, 12:42 PM ET

Los Angeles (E! Online) - Talk about throwing Caution to the wind.



Taiwan has yanked Ang Lee's award-winning erotic drama Lust, Caution as
its official entry for the Best Foreign-Language Film category for the
upcoming Oscars after officials at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts &
Sciences deemed the film ineligible.

"It was determined an insufficient number of Taiwanese participated in the
production of the film," Academy spokeswoman Teni Melidonian told E! Online
in an email.

The Academy rejected Lust under a rule stipulating that key personnel who
"exercise creative control" over the film—for example, the director,
cinematographer, editor and composer—hail from the foreign country doing
the submitting.

In Lust's case, the flick didn't help its cause by being a U.S.-Taiwan
coproduction.

And while both screenwriter Wang Hui-ling and Lee are from the island
nation, where the latter is considered a national icon, director of
photography Rodrigo Prieto is from Mexico, composer Alexandre Desplat
is French, and editor Tim Squyres was born in New Jersey.

Further, Lee's longtime producing partner and coscreenwriter, James Schamus,
hails from Detroit and the sound and visual effects work was performed by
veteran technicians in Hollywood.

"We and Ang Lee are disappointed," Chen Chun-jer, acting director of the
Taiwanese government's film department, told the Associated Press. "Lee has
a good chance of winning an Oscar. This movie was also popular in Taiwan."

According to Stanley Hung, secretary-general of Taiwan's Motion Picture and
Drama Association, the agency in charge of submitting Taiwan's Oscar entry,
the country planned to appeal the Academy's decision.

Melidonian, however, said no appeal was lodged and Taiwan instead submitted
Chen Huai-En's Island Etude.

Lust, Caution, or Se, Jie in Chinese, is a sexually charged spy thriller
set in WWII-era Shanghai. Joan Chen, Chih-ying Chu, Tony Keung and
Bollywood's Anupam Kher star in the story of a young woman who joins an
acting troupe only to find herself drawn into a plot to assassinate a
powerful political figure collaborating with the Japanese occupying the
city during the war.

The $14 million film, which was shot in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Malaysia,
was released by Focus Features in the U.S. and has so far grossed $11
million worldwide. It won the prestigious Golden Lion, the top prize at
last month's Venice Film Festival.

Taiwan has had good luck with Lee before, earning the Best Foreign-Language
Film Academy Award for 2000's martial-arts epic Crouching Tiger, Hidden
Dragon.

Lee's other credits include 1993's The Wedding Banquet, 1994's Eat Drink
Man Woman, 1995's Sense and Sensibility, 1997's The Ice Storm, 1999's Ride
with the Devil, 2003's Hulk, and 2005's gay cowboy drama Brokeback
Mountain, for which he earned the Oscar for Best Director.

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