The International Feature Film Oscar race has (mostly) reverted to its pre-COVID calendar for 2022. The past couple of years have been chaos with releases and deadline shifts but we're (almost) back to the usual which doesn't follow the calendar year overseas. "WHAT ON EARTH," you ask? "Oscar is always by calendar year!" Nope, not quite within this category...
LONG STORY
Generally speaking the "foreign" race has run fall-to-fall (October 1st- September 30th usually due to the time-consuming nature of submissions, paperwork, rounds of voting, etcetera) so in the past you would sometime see a movie that was a hit on the festival circuit in say, 2015, competing for the 2016 Oscars which were held in 2017. In other words some of the non-English language hits coming up at Venice, TIFF, NYFF, and AFI might not be eligible for the 95th Oscars (March 12th, 2023 honoring the 2022 film year) but might instead be submitted for the 96th Oscars (which will be held in 2024) depending on their release dates at home. That's getting into the fine details but the point is that though the 2021 race allowed countries to submit a film that opened at home anything within the calendar year, that isn't the case for 2022 as they are trying to shift back to the previous schedule. For the 95th Oscar submissons countries must choose their fighter (each country gets only one) by Monday October 3rd and it must have a one week released in that country by November 30th at the latest to qualify.
TO MAKE A LONG STORY SHORT
So, if, say, a film from France makes a huge splash at TIFF/Venice but isn't released until December in France, France won't be able to submit it this year. (For you deep-dive trivia enthusiast this fall-to-fall system is one of the reasons why France didn't submit Blue is the Warmest Color in its year since it opened in France (October 9th, 2013) after the Oscar release deadline (September 30th, 2013 that season) and a year later when it would have been technically eligible it was old news and they had moved on!
OSCAR CHARTS
We have a prediction chart up and we're currently working on creating the submission charts (which will be speculation at first) for this year's race. No country has yet announced their submission but since all submissions are due by October 3rd we should expect to be hearing some "official" titles real soon.