During a convivial but surprisingly political Oscars, Norway’s Joachim Trier accepted his International Film Oscar for Sentimental Value — a film about a film director (played by Stellan Skarsgård) and his dysfunctional family — while giving thanks to “the wonderful American writer James Baldwin,” who, he said, “makes us remember that all adults are responsible for all children; and let’s not vote for politicians who don’t take this seriously into account.”
For the third year running, the Best International Oscar has gone to a Cannes Competition film. Following Sean Baker’s Anora last year and Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest the year before that, this year’s award went to Trier’s Grand Prix winner. It was a reversal of fortune: Trier’s last Oscar-shortlisted film, The Worst Person in the World, lost out to another Palme d’Or-winning Oscar nominee — Ryusuke’s Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car — and when Jafar Panahi’s It Was an Accident pipped Sentimental Value to the big French prize in 2025, it seemed likely that history would repeat itself. But, though Panahi’s film was definitely one of the year’s most ubiquitous art movies, few trophies were forthcoming.
This year’s International Oscar race has been the most significant since Parasite’s historic win at the 2020 ceremony. Following South Korean director Bong Joon Ho’s surprise Best Picture winner, four of the five nominees this year landed nominations in other categories, starting with Sirāt in Sound and It Was Just an Accident in Original Screenplay. Where things started to get really interesting, however, was with Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent, which crossed over into Best Picture, Best Actor (for Wagner Moura) and Best Casting.
Had it won, The Secret Agent would have given a big win for Brazilian cinema after the wilderness years threatened by the Bolsonaro presidency, following Walter Salles’ win last year with I’m Still Here.
Surprisingly, although all four members of its core cast were nominated, Sentimental Value didn’t make the casting category — but it did make Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Editing (much to the surprise of its editor, who, apparently, was at doing some home DIY on the day the nomination was announced). Trier’s achievement is so seismic in Norway and its environs that it has been compared to the great Ingmar Bergman, who — hailing from Sweden, some 350 miles away — only achieved nine nominations in his entire lifetime.
It was a tight race this year. For context, some favored The Voice of Hind Rajab, which succeeded where Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice didn’t in making the rare transition from the Venice Film Festival (the event is a better bellwether for Best Picture than International, as Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia shows). However, that was always a long shot for the Oscar, as was Panahi’s film, as the Academy tends to stay away from films that are too overtly political — Iranian director Asghar Farhadi’s two wins, for A Separation (2011) and The Salesman (2016) — perhaps came from a sense of artistic solidarity, after the director first bumped heads with the Iranian authorities and then with President Trump’s administration, which led to a temporary travel ban on Muslims in 2017.