Why the Academy Awards should get rid of its foreign-language category
Film’s gilded night is drawing ever closer and today The Academy will shortlist the titles up for winning an Oscar come March. Brazilians, who have already been in party mode celebrating the double Golden Globe success of O Agente Secreto (The Secret Agent), are steadying themselves for further merriment. Set during Brazil’s late-1970s military dictatorship, it scooped Best Motion Picture in the non-English category, while the star, Wagner Moura, won Best Performance by a Male Actor in a drama. While the news sparked an outpouring of pride in Brazilian culture, there was also dissonance. Moura’s performance, delivered in Portuguese, was singled out above the English-speaking shortlist, while the movie itself was relegated to the “foreign language” category. The acting could travel but the film still needed a passport.
Industry awards – the Oscars in particular – have come under increasing criticism for keeping English as the default measure of universality, especially given the ever more international shortlist of films. Since South Korea’s Parasite won Best Picture at the Oscars in 2020, there has been at least one non-English movie in the line-up and, for the first time ever, two shortlisted in 2025: Brazil’s mother-courage story Ainda Estou Aqui (I’m Still Here) and Spanish-language French musical crime film Emilia Pérez.
Moura recently poked fun at the Anglocentric awards circuit. While announcing the winner of Best Picture on stage at the Critics’ Choice Awards, he quipped, “or as we call it in Brazil, best foreign picture”.
The joke is on the awards for being so out of step with a globalised industry. Streamers have opened access to non-English titles, offering much larger volumes of international content, and viewing habits have fundamentally changed as a result. Subtitles are no longer a barrier to the success of films such as Norwegian monster movie Troll or French shark thriller Under Paris (the top two non-English pictures on Netflix, each racking up more than 100 million views to date). Foreign films and series are now mainstream viewing in English-speaking markets and living rooms, especially among younger audiences; two thirds of people aged 18 to 34 regularly watch foreign-language content. So, are VPNs the new library card? One click and viewers have access to a world of titles, circumventing the quirks of territory licensing or offering up something new when they’ve exhausted their country’s streaming roster.
Cinema is, after all, a universal language – it’s just spoken in many dialects. We can all understand the human experience of TV characters, regardless of the vernacular. We follow the plot, understand the emotions and connect to the art. But the unique cultural context and norms of each filmmaker is what sets them apart – and that difference makes the viewing experience all the richer.
Films such as O Agente Secreto and Ainda Estou Aqui aren’t compelling because they are “foreign” – they are compelling because they are written, made and performed well. The persistence of language-based award categories feels increasingly misplaced. While viewers flick easily between languages, institutions continue to draw borders that the screen itself has already dissolved.
Catherine Balston is a journalist based in São Paulo and London. Keep your eyes peeled for an interview with the director of ‘O Agente Secreto’, coming up soon in Monocle.
Further reading? See ‘The death of the end credits: What streaming subtly gained by taking them away’.
