"If you are the type of Oscars obsessive who sets an early alarm on nominations morning (guilty!), you may have noticed something curious last month: before the announcement began on the Academy's Instagram Live, the comments were already filling up with Brazilian-flag emojis. And for good reason. "The Secret Agent," the acclaimed film by the director Kleber Mendonça Filho, walked away with four nominations—not just Best International Feature, for which it was Brazil's official submission, but also Best Picture, Best Actor (Wagner Moura), and a brand-new category, Best Casting."
"Brazil's cannonball into the Oscars race isn't an anomaly. After the #OscarsSoWhite scandal, a decade ago, the Academy brought in thousands of new members, becoming not just more racially diverse but more geographically sprawling. More than a fifth of Oscar voters are now outside of the United States. Perhaps as a result, foreign films have been breaking out of the international category and competing all over the Oscar map, from the Korean thriller "Parasite," which, in 2020, became the first non-English-language film to win Best Picture, to India's "RRR," which, in 2023, won Best Original Song, for the ecstatic earworm "Naatu Naatu.""
Brazilian cinema has gained notable traction at the Academy Awards, driven by both high-profile nominations and exuberant online fan engagement. "The Secret Agent" secured multiple nominations including Best Picture and Best Actor, while Adolpho Veloso received a nomination for Best Cinematography for "Train Dreams." "I'm Still Here" earned Best Picture and Best Actress nominations and won the international category, marking a milestone victory during Carnaval. Changes in Academy membership after the #OscarsSoWhite controversy expanded geographic diversity, with over a fifth of voters now outside the United States, enabling foreign films like "Parasite" and "RRR" to break into major categories.
Read at The New Yorker
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]