Yves Saint Laurent is French choice for Oscar bid, Belgium sends The Dardenne-brothers

A biopic exploring the darker side of the late French fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent is to represent France as a possible contender in the Best Foreign Language Film category at next year's Oscars.

"Saint Laurent", directed by Bertrand Bonello, will be France's nomination for the category, the country's National Cinema Centre said Monday.

Bonello's film shows the designer, who pioneered tuxedos for women and ready-to-wear, cruising for sex and taking cocaine and pills.

Concentrating on a few episodes between 1967 and 1976, it vividly conjures up the hedonistic pre-AIDS days of the early 1970s, with gay sex parties and drinking and drug-taking in nightclubs -- where Saint Laurent's muses Betty Catroux and Loulou de la Falaise are on hand.

A team from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will watch all the selected films from each continent before announcing a shortlist of nine films in December. That will be whittled down to just five in January 2015.

The Oscars ceremony will take place in Los Angeles on February 22, 2015, with nominations announced on January 15.

France last won in the Best Foreign Language Film category in 1993 for the film "Indochine" starring Catherine Deneuve.

Belgium, which has scored seven noms — including two in the last three years, with Bullhead (2011) and The Broken Circle Breakdown (2013) — but never has won, entered Two Days, One Night, the latest neorealist work from the brothers Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne. Starring Oscar winner Marion Cotillard, a Frenchwoman, the gutwrenching, High Noon (1952)-like drama has been among the most widely acclaimed films on this year's festival circuit. The Dardennes' three previous films that Belgium submitted for Oscar consideration — Rosetta (1999), The Son (2002) and The Child (2005) — did not even make the shortlist, but that seems likely to change this time around.