Offcue In Madrid, Ciaran Carty - A tempting selection of tapas for Spanish Oscar nomination

Penelope Cruz

James Joyce

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Three films are shortlisted to be Spain's official nomination for the Oscars on 7 March, but surprisingly Pedro Almodovar's Broken Embraces is not one of them. His protégé Isabel Coixet is, however, in the running with her terrific erotic thriller Map of the Sounds of Tokyo, which was premiered in Cannes. Fernanda Trueba, who won the 1994 Foreign Language Oscar with Belle Époque, is a contender with The Dancer and the Thief, which received an enthusiastic premiere at the San Sebastian Festival last week, as did Jose Campanella's romantic crime drama The Secret of Their Eyes, which lost out in the shortlist to current Spanish box-office hit, Gordos. The Spanish Film Academy, headed by director Alex de la Iglesia, will announce its Oscar choice from this list on Tuesday.

Colm McCarthy and An Bord Snip Nua mightn't attach much value to the arts, while the commission on taxation, costing the taxpayer €500,000, thinks tax concessions to writers and artists should be scrapped, but internationally Ireland is still admired for its support for culture. Javier Reverte, a leading Spanish poet, novelist and commentator on world affairs, writes admiringly in the influential daily newspaper El Pais of seeing posters for Samuel Beckett and James Joyce on a wall in Kerry. "If England loves its soldiers, France its cooks, Italy its tenors, the United States its actors and Spain its martyrs, Ireland loves its artists and, in particular, its writers," he says, quoting the now-threatened Haughey cultural tax breaks, introduced in 1969, as a measure of this enlightenment. Statistics put the total economic impact of the creative sector in Ireland last year at €11.8bn, a figure that adds strength to Neil Jordan's claim last weekend that "the Irish people have been let down by the banks, the construction industry and the church, but Ireland's cultural industry has not failed the country".

Brendan Gleeson's Emmy for his performance as Winston Churchill in Into The Storm was widely reported in Madrid. Indeed it's hard to get away from evidence of Irish cultural achievements. Watching French director Rémi Bezancon's César award-winning family drama The First Day of the Rest of Your Life, I could pick up Neil Hannon's 'In Pursuit of Happiness' on the soundtrack.