The Oscars are more international than ever. So why is the international film category broken?

This image released by Janus and Sideshow Films shows Kani Kusruti, left, and Divya Prabha in a scene from 'All We Imagine As Light.' (Janus and Sideshow Films via AP)

NEW YORK (AP) — For many filmmakers, the Oscars are a pipe dream. But not because they think their movies aren’t good enough.

The Iranian director, Mohammad Rasoulof, for instance, knew his native country was more likely to jail him than submit his film for the Academy Awards. Iran, like some other countries including Russia, has an official government body that selects its Oscar submission. For a filmmaker like Rasoulof, who has brazenly tested his country’s censorship restrictions, that made the Oscars out of the question.

“A lot of independent filmmakers in Iran think that we would never be able to make it to the Oscars,” Rasoulof said in an interview through an interpreter. “The Oscars were never part of my imagination because I was always at war with the Iranian government.”

Unlike other categories at the Academy Awards, the initial selection for the best international film category is outsourced. Individual countries make their submission, one movie per country.

Sometimes that’s an easy call. When the category — then “best foreign language film” — was established, it would have been hard to quibble with Italy’s pick: Federico Fellini’s “La Strada,” the category’s first winner in 1957.

But, often, there’s great debate about which movie a country ought to submit — especially when undemocratic governments do the selecting. Rasoulof’s fellow Iranian New Wave director Jafar Panahi likewise had no hopes of Iran selecting his 2022 film “No Bears” for the Oscars. At the time, Panahi was imprisoned by Iran, which didn’t release him until he went on a hunger strike.

Rasoulof’s film, “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” — a movie shot clandestinely in Iran before its director and cast fled the country — ultimately was nominated for best international film. But on March 2, it will be at the Oscars representing Germany, the country Rasoulof made his home in after being sentenced to flogging and eight years in prison in Iran.

“The film, to a large degree, is now a German film, both because of the distribution company and because of all the people who worked on it post-production, including myself,” said Rasoulof. “I’m a person who’s been ripped of his Iranian national identity.”

The Oscars are more international than ever. This year’s lead nominee, “Emilia Pérez,” is the most nominated non-English language film ever. It’s a Mexico-set, Spanish-language film shot outside Paris — a reflection of how borderless film can be. (It’s France’s Oscar submission.) For the seventh year in a row, a foreign-language film has been nominated for best picture. And for the first time, in fact, there are two up for Hollywood’s top prize: “Emilia Pérez” and the Brazilian drama “I’m Still Here.”

The historic 2020 win for “Parasite,” the first non-English language best picture winner, wasn’t just, as director Bong Joon Ho called it then, a victory over “the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles.” It was the sign of a tectonic shift in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. To diversify its membership, the academy has in recent years invited hundreds of overseas voters, tipping the Oscar scales. The Academy Awards have gone global.

And yet the Academy Awards' marquee category for international cinema, best international film, has been continually criticized as unjust, outdated and subject to political interference. “The Oscars’ international film category is broken,” wrote film critic Alissa Wilkinson in 2020 for Vox. “Nothing short of a total overhaul of the category is order,” wrote Variety critic Peter Debruge in 2022.

The academy has sometimes tweaked the category, which was renamed in 2020. In 2006, the academy ruled that international submissions no longer needed to be in the language of its home country. Last year’s winner, “The Zone of Interest,” was a German-language film set at Auschwitz, but marked the United Kingdom’s first best international film Oscar.

To help guard the process from outside influence, the academy in 2023 specified that each country’s selection committees must be at least 50% composed of “filmmakers, artists and craftspeople.” But who those people are, and what their subjective sense of national identity might be, has often been questionable.

This year, one of the most conspicuous absences from the Oscars is Payal Kapadia’s “All We Imagine As Light,” an Indian drama that numerous critics have named the best film of 2024. It was the first Indian film to play in competition at the Cannes Film Festival in 30 years.

The Film Federation of Indian instead chose Kiran Rao’s “Laapataa Ladies,” a glossier comedy from Jio Studios that the academy ultimately passed on. FFI president Ravi Kottarakara told the Hollywood Reporter India that the jury, which was all male, felt “All We Imagine As Light” was like “watching a European film taking place in India.”

Kapadia, speaking shortly after that decision, praised the choice of “Laapataa Ladies” while taking issue with the jury’s metric.

“What is Indian? It’s a very big continent that we have,” said Kapadia. “There’s a lot of Indias. I’m really happy with the film they chose. It’s a really nice film. I liked it a lot. But I feel like these kind of statements, I don’t know what purpose they serve. The committee that made the selection was 13 men. Is that very Indian?”

Rancor over the Greek selection process led 20 filmmakers to withdraw their submissions for this year’s Oscars to protest the Greece Ministry of Culture’s sudden replacement of selection committee members.

Renos Haralambidis, one of the filmmakers who withdrew his film, told Balkan Investigative Reporting Network: “I believe that the committee that will choose which film will be nominated for the Oscars should be independent of the state, because I believe the less the state in art, the better.”

The question for the academy is: Does it want this annual drama in the international film category? Should governments, autocratic or not, have any say in what films are in the running for one of the most sought-after Oscars?

The film academy declined to comment for this article.

These are issues the Oscars have long been aware of. Sometimes, the academy has even lent a hand to a country making its first submission. That was the case when Bhutan established a selection committee so it could nominated Pawo Choyning Dorji’s 2019 film “Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom.” It surprised pundits and received an Oscar nomination, Bhutan’s first.

What options does the academy have? It could make its own international film selection committee, like those that exist in other categories, and remove governments completely from the process. Some have advocated for expanding the category to 10 nominees, like best picture, and doing away with the one-nation, one-movie rule. Another option: Keep the current system but allow for several academy committee-chosen slots so that political dissidents aren’t ruled out.

Such changes would surely be welcome news to those who believed France last year should have submitted Justine Triet’s best picture-nominated legal drama “Anatomy of a Fall,” or India ought to have backed the Telugu-language smash “RRR.” Both picked up Oscars in other categories.

Regardless, it’s clear that geopolitics have increasingly made the best international film award at the Oscars almost as quarrelsome as the rest of our global existence.

For any peace in the category, you’d have to look to the Latvian entry, “Flow,” an animated animal parable nominated for both best international film and best animated film. While it’s nominated by Latvia, it contains no language, at all, just a few meows and some barking.

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Jake Coyle, The Associated Press