The deadline for countries to submit movies for the 2026 Oscars’ international feature category arrives Wednesday. And, as usual, the submissions — each country gets to select one film — have produced no shortage of grievances and outrage.
For starters: France picked Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi’s Palme d’Or-winning moral thriller “It Was Just an Accident.” Panahi has been arrested and imprisoned by the Iranian government on multiple occasions and is currently banned from making movies in the country. Not surprisingly, “It Was Just an Accident” isn’t Iran’s Oscar selection. Instead, it’s France taking up for Panahi, allowed under academy rules because the film is a French-funded production and Panahi is considered a French resident. (Losing out in turn are Netflix’s “Nouvelle Vague,” about the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s New Wave classic “Breathless”; Jodie Foster vehicle “A Private Life”; and animated feature contender “Arco.”)
It’s the second straight year that another country has represented an acclaimed Iranian movie. In 2024, Germany selected Mohammad Rasoulof’s political drama “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” a film Rasoulof shot in secret in Iran before fleeing the country. (Like Panahi, Rasoulof has been arrested and imprisoned on multiple occasions for the content of his films, labeled by the government as “propaganda.”)
All this leads to a question raised annually: Isn’t there a better way to choose movies for the Oscars’ international feature category, one that sidesteps the politics of repressive regimes and produces a list of films that are the best the world has to offer?
After talking to a number of people involved in the process, I’ve come to the following conclusion: You might think there’s a better way, but the better way might be even worse than the system we have in place now.
“Yes, it’s a flawed system — you could argue a deeply flawed system — but I don’t know what the right system is,” says Mark Johnson, who chaired the motion picture academy’s international feature executive committee for 19 years and has thought long and hard on the subject.
The category fix most commonly offered is to abolish the longstanding “one country, one movie” rule and let Oscar voters simply choose their favorites from the hundreds of eligible international films released in the United States. Stop outsourcing the job and let academy members do it all themselves.
No longer would you have to idly watch as France’s selection committee picks the beautiful food-driven romance “The Taste of Things” over “Anatomy of a Fall,” which, despite being passed over for international film, still wound up with five Oscar nods in 2024. You wouldn’t have to grind your teeth when India overlooks Payal Kapadia’s dreamy “All We Imagine As Light” or S.S. Rajamouli’s crowd-pleasing “RRR.” Or, to cite an example from just this year, you wouldn’t have wait to hear that Brazil submitted Cannes darling “The Secret Agent” over “Manas,” which counts Sean Penn among its executive producers.
You could vote for any — or all — of those films on your own.
One problem with this formula is that it would inevitably turn the international film category into a popularity contest, favoring movies with high profiles. And while about 20% of academy membership is global, the majority of those members reside in Europe. Four of the last five non-English-language films that have been nominated for best picture have been predominately European productions, and it’s not a leap to think that European movies would have an advantage under a free-for-all system.
The current academy rules for the international feature category level the playing field. Members who opt in to vote — and there are about 1,000 doing so in the preliminary round — must watch some 15 movies, selected so they’re not all from a particular genre or, say, all the Cannes prizewinners. Different groups get different movies. The 15 top vote-getters advance to a second round, where, in order to vote, an academy member must watch all the shortlisted films, a rule that preceded this year’s similar mandate for all Oscar categories.
It’s a system that allows smaller, low-profile movies to compete alongside festival favorites, resulting in films like Tunisia’s audacious 2020 entry “The Man Who Sold His Skin” and the 2021 Bhutanese drama “Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom” to secure nominations. Those breakthroughs are still outliers. But they probably wouldn’t happen at all if the current system were scrapped.
And that would be unfortunate for someone like Kaouther Ben Hania, the Tunisian filmmaker who, after seeing her film “The Man Who Sold His Skin” nominated, went on to make the heart-wrenching Oscar-nominated documentary “Four Daughters” and the new drama, “The Voice of Hind Rajab,” which is Tunisia’s international film entry this year after winning acclaim at the Venice Film Festival.
“I’m representing Africa and all the Arab countries, so I feel a huge responsibility,” she told The Times when “The Man Who Sold His Skin” became the first Tunisian movie to earn an international feature nomination. “I am very hopeful and can see that things are changing for the better. It’s common today to hear the speeches about diversity in the media and the new opportunities for women and people of color, but when it comes down to financing and money, people still question your abilities.”
The academy adjusted the rules governing the international category in 2023, specifying that each country’s selection committees be at least 50% composed of “filmmakers, artists and craftspeople.” In theory, that’s good, though you do wonder who makes up the other part of some countries’ panels. Repressive regimes can and have stacked the committees so they align with state interests.
Again, it’s a flawed system. “The academy can’t to go into the committee and say, ‘You’re not legitimate,’” Johnson says.
On occasion, a movie that a government would prefer to silence ends up advancing. The Arabic-language film “The Sea,” a drama about a 12-year-old Palestinian boy attempting to reach the Mediterranean Sea from the West Bank, recently won best film at the Ophir Awards, Israel’s version of the Oscars. Per protocol, it automatically became Israel’s international feature Oscar submission.
Shortly after the ceremony, Israeli Culture Minister Miki Zohar said he would cancel government funding for the Ophirs, calling it a “disgraceful ceremony.”
You never know when a country might want to suppress art expressing a critical opinion.
“Thank God it could never happen here,” Johnson says with a rueful laugh.
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