America is no longer the biggest market for Hollywood movies. Which raises the point: if Hollywood is just another territory maybe it's time Ireland was finally granted its independence by the industry. Up to now it has been treated as part of the UK territory.

Ireland's box-office figures are translated from euro to sterling and included in the UK figures. Some distributors still treat Irish journalists as UK regional press, as distinct from the London national press. So let's join Hollywood and become a separate territory.

MEANWHILE, the Academy Awards made a big effort last year to eliminate anomolies the led to so many foreign languages classics . . . notably The Motorcycle Diaries, Three Colours: Red and Hidden . . . being excluded from consideration because they didn't exclusively belong to any one country. Submissions for the Oscar are now accepted in any mixture of languages as long as the dominant language is not English. Yet this has still not been enough to qualify Lust, Caution, Taiwan director Ang Lee's Venice grand-prize-winner, filmed in Chinese, which the Academy has rejected as Taiwan's entry. Similarly, Eran Kolorin's The Band's Visit, a wonderful tale about an Egyptian police band touring Israel, has been disqualified by the Academy as Israel's nomination because more than half its dialogue in not in Hebrew.

Surely the solution is to accept nominations on an individual, not a national, basis, and with no rigid rules on language. It's the movie that matters, not the bureaucracy.

Cinema box-office
ALL IRELAND TOP FIVE (weekend 19-21 October)
1 (1) Ratatouille (Brad Bird) 577,450 ( 1,495,425 to date)
2(-) Stardust (Matthew Vaughn) 272,655 (-)
3(2) The Heartbreak Kid (Bobby Farrelly) 217,571 ( 710,118 to date)
4(-) Rendition (Gavin Hood) 115, 351 (-)
5 (-) Nancy Drew (Andrew Fleming) 67,759 (-)

US TOP FIVE MOVIES (weekend 19-21 October)
1 (-) 30 Days Of night (David Slade) $16m (-)
2(1) Why Did I Get Married? (Tyler Perry) $12.1m ($38.9m to date)
3(1) The Game Plan (Andy Fickman) $8.1m ($69.2m)
4(4) Michael Clayton (Tony Gilroy) $7.1m ($21.9m)
5(-) Gone Baby Gone (Ben Affleck) $6m (-)