Languages

PARK CITY, Utah - Writer Doris Lessing was 92 years old when French filmmaker Anne Fontaine met her last year, and she made quite an impression. "She's wild," Fontaine says. "She has a look I'd never seen before: eyes that go into your head, like a fakir, so intense, not hiding anything. " The two women were speaking because Fontaine was going to turn Lessing's novella "The Grandmothers" into a film and the Nobel Prize-winning author had some unexpected advice for adapting her story of two women looking back on their lives.

The record voting turnout for this year's Oscar nominees, as reported by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, is guaranteed to spill over into at least one category when final ballots go out next month. As of this year, academy members will now receive screeners of the five movies nominated for documentary, meaning they will no longer have to schlep to special theatrical screenings. Might this help the popular "Searching for Sugar Man" take the Oscar in a race typically dominated by issue-oriented movies?

AUSTIN, Texas - Don Graham, an English professor at the University of Texas at Austin, likes to tell the story of a student who once worked as a cowboy. "Wore hat and boots," Graham says. "He was the real deal. " At the end of the academic year, the student told Graham, "You were the only professor at UT I ever had who spoke English. " "What he meant," Graham says, "was I was the only one who spoke his language. " And by language, the student meant talking Texan - the distinctive twang and drawl that becomes almost an attitude, from the first "howdy" to the last "thank you, kindly.

"Amour" won the Golden Globe for best foreign language film on Sunday night. Austria's "Amour" has been an art-house awards powerhouse since winning the top prize at last year's Cannes Film Festival. Director Michael Haneke won the Golden Globe for his previous film, "The White Ribbon," and "Amour" recently racked up an impressive five Oscar nominations as well. With strong performances by Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintignant, the film is a deeply felt, harrowing examination of an aging couple facing the end of life.

With the Spanish-language television space heating up, industry leader Univision Communications Inc. is making an aggressive move to solidify its dominance. On Monday, the media company plans to rename its secondary broadcast network UniMas, which translates loosely as Univision Plus, underlining its ties to its hugely popular sister network Univision. The company also is locking up rights to programs from key Latin American producers to buffet gains from the flood of competitors charging the field.

Something like a glammed-up re-imagining of the United Nations, year-in, year-out the foreign-language film category at the Oscars is a home to diplomacy, drama, intrigue and heartbreak. And that's just the process to secure a nomination and then the award, to say nothing of the actual storytelling portrayed on-screen. The recently announced shortlist of nine films vying for the nomination in the category did nevertheless contain the two presumed front-runners, the Austrian awards-magnet "Amour" and France's international box office sensation "The Intouchables.

When Milagros Lizarraga wants comfort food, she heads to her mainstay restaurant in Hollywood - Los Balcones del Peru on the corner of Vine Street and De Longpre Avenue. She usually orders lomo saltado , a signature Peruvian dish that is a mixture of sauteed sirloin, onion and tomatoes served over white rice with french fries. A first-generation Peruvian immigrant, Lizarraga envisions a hub of Peruvian business and culture in the area. "There is Chinatown, Koreatown, Thai Town, but what about Peru?"

Denise Mullins went to pick up her son from the Speech and Language Development Center in Buena Park, where he was newly enrolled, and was moved by what she saw. Several kids walked toward Mullins' son, who uses a wheelchair, and yelled, "Hi, Giovanni!" The non-verbal 11-year-old responded by signing "Hi. " "I said, 'You know, that's the setting I want my son in,' " Mullins said. "It was a really good moment to see your kid be part of a social network. " Before attending the Buena Park center, Giovanni needed some prompting to respond to others, his mother said.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences on Friday moved forward with nine potential nominated movies for the next round of voting in the foreign language film category for the 85th Academy Awards, narrowing the field from 71 qualifying films. There were no major surprises in the winnowed-down lineup, with the list including Austria's "Amour," which won the Palme d'Or at this year's Cannes Film Festival, as well as France's "The Intouchables," which has been a worldwide box-office sensation.

For more than 20 years, Michael Haneke has been observing fictional families under siege. The attack might creep corrosively from within, as in his first feature, "The Seventh Continent"; it might arrive in the form of sadistic home invaders, as in his notorious "Funny Games," a movie so important to him that he made it twice; or it might take the form of an anonymous menacing voyeur, as in "Caché. " With its focus on a loving marriage, his new film, "Amour," at first suggests a departure from the Austrian director's body of anxiety-steeped work.