Aamir's Taare Zameen Par out of Oscar race

While A R Rahman dazzled the world by winning the first Golden Globe for India, Aamir Khan's much hyped directorial debut couldn't make it beyond the initial round of screening of nominees for the Oscars in the Best Foreign Language Film category.

Out of the sixty-five films that had originally qualified in the category, nine films will advance to the next round of voting in the category for the 81st Academy Awards. Unfortunately for India, these nine names do not include Aamir Khan's Taare Zameen Par.

The list includes the acclaimed Israeli documentary Waltz with Bashir, which recently also won the Golden Globe for foreign language film. The movie is about the country's invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Another nominee in the list is the German film Baader Meinhof Complex, which takes a unique look into that country's notorious terrorist group, the Red Army Faction.The complete list of qualifying films, arranged in alphabetical order by country, are:

Austria, Revanche Gotz Spielmann(director)
Canada, The Necessities of Life, Benoit Pilon(director)
France, The Class, Laurent Cantet (director)
Germany, The Baader Meinhof Complex, Uli Edel (director)
Israel, Waltz with Bashir, Ari Folman(director)
Japan, Departures, Yojiro Takita (director)
Mexico, Tear This Heart Out, Roberto Sneider (director)
Sweden, Everlasting Moments, Jan Troell (director)
Turkey, 3 Monkeys, Nuri Bilge Ceylan (director)

The films were chosen by a committee of several hundred Academy members and will be narrowed down to five nominees for 2008 by a specially selected committee in New York and Los Angeles. These nominees would be announced on January 22, 2009 and one name that Indians would have loved to hear in the nominee announcements won't be there anymore.

The Academy Awards for outstanding film achievements of 2008 will be presented on February 22, 2009.

A film about a dyslexic child, who was impressively portrayed by debutant child actor Darsheel Safari, Taare Zameen Par was chosen as India's official entry to the Oscars in the foreign language film category. The film was selected over critically acclaimed works such as Marathi films Valu and Tingya, Nishikant Kamat's Mumbai Meri Jaan, Neeraj Pandey's A Wednesday, Ashutosh Gowarikar's Jodhaa Akbar, Abhishek Kapoor's Rock On, Subhash Ghai's Black and White and the Telugu film Ghanyam.