Everyone, or at least a large chunk of Twitter, wants to know whether Timothée Chalamet’s extravagant, over-the-top Oscar campaign for Best Actor will actually pay off. Between the highs and lows since his “chasing greatness” speech at last year’s SAG Awards, to his excellent performance in Marty Supreme, the young but undeniably talented actor has everything it takes to finally claim his holy grail. But even with an eccentric campaign, Chalamet is a player running a classic playbook: screenings, endorsements from industry heavyweights, and an archetypal role as an eccentric character in a period film.
Coming up from behind, with more charm and more to say, is Wagner Moura, winner of Best Actor in a Drama at the Golden Globes for The Secret Agent. The Brazilian actor has been running a quiet campaign, but one backed by intellectual weight and a Palme d’Or at Cannes. He is the single biggest threat to his four American competitors in the category.
And it’s not just Chalamet — in almost no category can you confidently say which actor, film, or director is the absolute frontrunner over these past months of red carpets. Among Americans and industry professionals from around the world, this has been one of the most dynamic and unpredictable award races in recent memory.
For the uninitiated, the Oscars can seem like a one-night event where the best of cinema is simply recognized. Even if “the best” is inherently subjective, the road to the golden statuette is more like a political campaign or a World Cup run. Whoever stands out the most in the preceding months (with the biggest budget and the most strategic visibility) tends to win. A major forecasting tool is the cascade of awards that precede Oscar night: the Actors Awards, Golden Globes, BAFTA, PGA, WGA… there are many. And when an underdog happens to win
Following the awards season can therefore be an exhausting exercise, as audiences and cinephiles around the world hold their breath making wild predictions and praying that a controversy or a cancellation won’t cost their favorite film the golden statuette.
The reasons for an increasing (and way more exciting) awards race in the last couple of years are many. It started over a decade ago when the Academy nominated 20 white actors across the acting categories. April Reign, who had a considerable following on Black Twitter, created the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite, which quickly reached the top of trending topics that day. The movement for more representation and more recognition in the entertainment industry pushed the Academy and other organizations to play a different game, one more attuned to diversity in award recognition. It was a run amidst the major studios to declare they were, and always will be, “allies” for marginalized communities and underrepresented voices in cinema.
This also reflected in American box office results: Black Panther (2018) grossed over $1.35 billion worldwide and, alongside Get Out, Crazy Rich Asians, and many others, earned Best Picture nominations at the Oscars in their respective years. A recent UCLA study found that in the last fiscal year of 2025, nearly half of films with BIPOC representation outperformed at the box office — including Sinners, One Battle After Another, and the live-action Lilo & Stitch.
Beyond that, in recent years, 22% of Academy members have been based outside the United States, while the Golden Globes announced in 2024 an expansion of 310 voters, adding 215 international members. Those additions helped Brazilian actress Fernanda Torres win Best Actress in a Drama for I’m Still Here last year, and the controversial French film Emilia Pérez take Best International Film.
In this year’s Best Picture category, two foreign-language films stand out: the Brazilian The Secret Agent, with three additional nominations including Best Actor for Wagner Moura; and the Norwegian Sentimental Value, which weaves the Nordic language with English and picked up nine nominations, including three for actors performing in their native tongue. A feat that shouldn’t go unnoticed. It’s also worth noting that, beyond being nominated, both Moura and the cast of Sentimental Value (along with Iranian director and Palme d’Or winner Jafar Panahi) have been consistent presences at press events, industry screenings, and the broader narrative of this awards season.
Still, how far you’re willing to stick your neck out is always a matter of timing. It’s not just about what you say, but who benefits from it and where, behind the scenes, it can come back to affect you. International players have a distinct advantage here: whatever they say leads to far less fallout than the same words from their American counterparts. They don’t face consequences from powerful American executives whose views they might contradict, because their films are generally financed, produced, and supported in their countries of origin.
The Berlin Film Festival last year found itself in the eye of a storm as the conflict in the Middle East and the immigration crisis in the United States intensified in parallel. When asked how they felt about it, American actors including Ethan Hawke, alongside jury president Wim Wenders, stated that “we need to stay out of politics.”
In contrast, Wagner Moura told The New York Times: “The older I get, it’s about bringing more and more of myself to the character. It’s like sharing something about myself, something I believe. I’m a very political person, and of course it manifests in the things I do. Art and politics are very close.” NEON, the North American distributor of The Secret Agent, went as far as adopting the slogan “Take a Stand” for its Oscar campaign — NEON being the distributor of four of the five Best International Film nominees.
Speaking of the distributor: NEON holds the last six Palme d’Or winners from Cannes, five of them in non-English languages. With less than a decade in existence, the company, founded by former Alamo Drafthouse executives, understood that the future of cinema lay in finding the hidden gems of international film, making noise in Hollywood, and unsettling even the major studios in the process.
This is a new era in Hollywood, with strange mergers, AI-generated slop flooding the market, and films rarely being shot in the city itself. And yet somehow, the Oscars this Sunday prove that cinema has every reason to become more international. Or better yet, less American-centered. Not because American cinema is lacking, but because beyond it lies worlds of possibility and narrative that reach far past the traditional circuit of press screenings and industry dinners. At Cannes last year, the team behind The Secret Agent brought a touch of Brazilian Carnival to the red carpet, with dancers and actors performing for the French crowds around them. This year, the character Armando (played by Moura) became a popular Carnival costume back home. And come Oscar night, it’s set to be a genuine celebration across the country.
Whether he wins or not, the future of cinema has every reason to be more festive than we’ve been giving it credit for.
