Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film

The Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film is one of the Academy Awards of Merit, or Oscars, handed out annually by the U.S.-based Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS). It is given to a feature-length motion picture produced outside the United States of America with a predominantly non-English dialogue track.

When the first Academy Awards ceremony was held on May 16, 1929 to honor films released in 1927/28, there was no separate category for foreign language films. Between 1947 and 1955, the Academy presented Special/Honorary Awards to the best foreign language films released in the United States. These Awards, however, were not handed out on a regular basis (no Award was given in 1953), and were not competitive since there were no nominees but simply one winning film per year. For the 1956 (29th) Academy Awards, a competitive Academy Award of Merit, known as the Best Foreign Language Film Award, was created for non-English speaking films, and has been given annually since then.

Art film

An art film is typically a serious, independent film aimed at a niche market rather than a mass market audience. An art film is "intended to be a serious artistic work, often experimental and not designed for mass appeal"; they are "made primarily for aesthetic reasons rather than commercial profit", and they contain "unconventional or highly symbolic content".

Film critics and film studies scholars typically define an art film as possessing "formal qualities that mark them as different from mainstream Hollywood films", which can include, among other elements, a sense of social realism; an emphasis on the authorial expressiveness of the director; and a focus on the thoughts, dreams, or motivations of characters, as opposed to the unfolding of a clear, goal-driven story. Film scholar David Bordwell describes art cinema as "a film genre, with its own distinct conventions".

Art film producers usually present their films at specialty theatres (repertory cinemas, or, in the U.S., "arthouse cinemas") and film festivals. The term art film is much more widely used in the United States, the UK and Australia than in Europe, where the term is more associated with "auteur" films and "national cinema" (e.g., German national cinema). Because they are aimed at small niche market audiences, they can rarely get the financial backing that will permit large production budgets, expensive special effects, costly celebrity actors, or huge advertising campaigns, as are used in widely released mainstream blockbuster films. Art film directors make up for these constraints by creating a different type of film, which typically uses lesser-known film actors (or even amateur actors) and modest sets to make films that focus much more on developing ideas or exploring new narrative techniques or film-making conventions.

Trousers

Trousers (pants in North America) are an item of clothing worn from the waist to the ankles, covering both legs separately (rather than with cloth extending across both legs as in robes, skirts, and dresses).

In the UK the word "pants" generally means underwear and not trousers.Shorts are similar to trousers, but with legs that come down only to around the area of the knee, higher or lower depending on the style of the garment. To distinguish them from shorts, trousers may be called "long trousers" in certain contexts such as school uniform, where tailored shorts may be called "short trousers", especially in the UK.

In most of the Western world, trousers have been worn since ancient times and throughout the Medieval period, becoming the most common form of lower-body clothing for adult males in the modern world, although shorts are also widely worn, and kilts and other garments may be worn in various regions and cultures. Breeches were worn instead of trousers in early modern Europe by some men in higher classes of society. Since the mid-20th century, trousers have increasingly been worn by women as well. Jeans, made of denim, are a form of trousers for casual wear, now widely worn all over the world by both sexes. Shorts are often preferred in hot weather or for some sports and also often by children and teenagers. Trousers are worn on the hips or waist and may be held up by their own fastenings, a belt or suspenders (braces). Leggings are form-fitting trousers, of a clingy material, often knitted cotton and spandex (elastane).