Commentary: The Future of the Oscars Depends on the International Market (AWFJ)

This article was originally published by The Alliance of Women Film Journalists

Non-English-language feature films received a record number of nominations to the Oscars this year. The nominations show the Academy is "Becoming a Citizen of the World,” The Hollywood Reporter proclaimed on Jan. 22, citing the #OscarsSoWhite backlash from a decade ago that prompted the Academy to diversity its membership, including now a full 25% of voting members from abroad.

But there’s another way to look at this.

This year’s international diversification might also reveal that the Academy is cognizant of two simultaneous trends that are likely to shape its future. On the one hand, the Oscars have become increasingly less relevant to US audiences – their viewership is aging and relatively stagnant, which suggests their cultural significance for US audiences is sliding. On the other hand, international audiences and filmmakers still pay very close attention to the Oscars.

The Academy seems to finally be waking up to the fact that the future of the Oscars may well depend on the international, not the domestic, market.

Oscar Who?

The Oscars audience has been flagging for years. Although viewership has been growing slightly each year since hitting an all-time low of 10.4 million viewers in 2021, reports suggest that those 55 and over still make up the largest demographic loyal to the ceremony.

Anecdotally, I surveyed a small group of my US college students, all enrolled in at least one film course, about the Oscars. The majority (60%) expressed interest in the awards, and 73% said an Oscar nomination or win would motivate them to watch a movie. But the other 40% said they don’t pay much attention to the Oscars (60% said the same of the International category), and less than half had watched the ceremony in full more than once in the last five years.

The Oscars have tried to appeal to younger audiences by moving away from a solely linear-TV model, including a livestream on Hulu last year that was reportedly glitchy and added fewer overall viewers than hoped. This year, the Academy announced the Oscars will move from ABC to YouTube in 2029.

The kinds of films nominated have also changed in the last 15 years, shifting from blockbuster films with mass appeal, like 1998 sensation Titanic (a time when the show was watched by almost three times as many people), to artsier, international and more message-driven films, like Best Picture winners The Artist (2012), 12 Years a Slave (2014) and Moonlight (2015).

This was all before the Academy introduced new diversity and inclusion requirements for Best Picture nominees in the 2020’s but after an unfavorable 2012 LA Times investigation found the Academy membership of the time was 94% white and 77% male, with a median age of 62. Of course, that only reflected the realities of Hollywood: “the academy's demographics mirror the industry's,” the LA Times wrote.

Sluggish ratings today might still have to do with that demographic disconnect (or perception thereof), or perhaps a rising “America First” conservatism in the US less interested in artsy or international films (some suggest this year’s big studio nominees, One Battle After Another and Sinners, are a response to that). The explosion of streaming post-COVID, and more fragmented viewing options in general, has surely contributed as well.

“Viewership for the annual Oscars show has long served as a cultural barometer — a way for Hollywood to gauge its relevance amid shifting political winds, fracturing media habits and changing social values,” The New York Times summarized last March. Yet, as the same article pointed out, that viewership could also count “people watching overseas, people catching a recording a few days later,” not just “live viewing in the United States.”

The “International” Ghetto

The fact that so many international films earned nominations this year is a welcome and long overdue awakening. In its domestic PR role, the Academy has naval gazed year after year, nominating almost exclusively US productions in top categories and ignoring dozens of remarkable and deserving global films for anything beyond the International category, turning this into a kind of ghetto expected to accommodate any and all films made outside the US or not in English.

But only one per country, of course.

And let’s not get started on the ethnocentrism of the official category’s previous name, “Foreign-Language” from its inception in 1956 until its rebranding as “International” in 2019. Foreign to whom? It’s also noteworthy that Academy voters have long shown a preference for European films, which are far and away the most frequent nominees and winners of the category.

There are other issues. Nationality is rarely clear-cut in international co-productions. When the Academy rules changed in 2006 to allow for films in non-national languages, France was shortlisted with films like Turkey-set Mustang (2015) and Iran-set It Was Just An Accident (this year), Iran-shot The Seed of the Sacred Fig (2025) represented Germany, and Germany-set The Zone of Interest won for the UK.

Another eligibility restriction – that minimum 50 percent of dialogue be in a language other than English – has also caused issues. In 2019, the Academy refused the entry of Nigerian film "Lionheart" in the International category because it was filmed mostly in English, although English is the official language of Nigeria.

Meanwhile, controversies regularly surface over individual countries’ management of their nominations and claims of government interference. In 2023, the Academy tinkered with the International nomination process, requiring each country’s selection committee to have at least 5 members, 50% of whom are “filmmakers, artists and craftspeople,” in order to minimize political interference. Even so, in 2024, dozens of Greek filmmakers protested their country’s selection process, withdrawing their films from consideration and publicizing “serious doubts on the credibility and validity of the procedure.”

Some have called on the Academy to create its own International Oscar selection committee. Netflix wants to do away with the minimum 7-day theatrical release requirement. Right now, around 1,000 Academy members volunteer to vote in the International category, agreeing to watch 15 pre-selected films each. The most voted of those make the first shortlist of 15, all of which must be watched by members voting on the final shortlist of the five official nominees.

Oscars’ Sway Abroad

Despite it all, more than 90 countries faithfully submit films each year for consideration in the International Oscar category, demonstrating the status the awards still have globally. The obvious expectation is that an Oscar, even just a nomination, will have a direct impact on distribution sales, audience interest and box office. Marketers take advantage of a nomination to publicize films that might otherwise elicit little notice, even in their home markets.

After South Korea’s Parasite became the first non-English film ever to win the Best Picture Oscar (it also won Best Director, International Film and Original Screenplay) in 2020, it went on to earn more than $262 million at the worldwide box office, including $53.8 million domestically, making it the fifth top-grossing non-English-language film of all time at the domestic market. In fact, most of the films on that top grossers list received at least one Oscar nomination in their day.

For a filmmaker from Europe, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, Africa and so on, an Oscar nomination can mean the difference between making a next film, or not. It can help ensure interest and a hope for financing in fragile industries around the world. It serves as a calling card to the international industry and Hollywood. Nominees are often positioned back home as representing their entire industry and even country at the Oscars.

“There's no doubt that winning an Oscar for a foreign film is a huge, important thing in terms of career potential,” Danish director Susanne Bier, twice nominated and one-time winner of the International Oscar, told me in an interview for AWFJ in 2023. “It opens a door where you can actually meet people, which is the first step, and it’s important. Then your work has to kind of live up to that because there are no guarantees, but it does actually matter.”

Oscar nominee Joachim Trier, whose Sentimental Value earned a whopping nine Oscar nominations this year, told The Hollywood Reporter earlier this month: “Part of being a filmmaker is what I call paying promo tax. It’s a privilege. It means that you are being seen and people care. I don’t take it lightly. I come from Norway, a tiny country, the suburbs of Europe. We’re very grateful when anything we make travels.”

Kleber Mendonca Filho, director of The Secret Agent, the Brazilian film with four nominations this year, explained the importance of the American awards season for the film’s trajectory back home: “The reaction in Brazil is huge. The film is still doing very well in cinemas. It’s gaining more screens now because of the Golden Globes and this week with the [Oscar] nominations, so it’s a great moment,” he told Deadline.

In becoming more international in its membership, and in nominating international films in categories beyond the International ‘ghetto,’ the Academy is acknowledging that the Oscars today are arguably more closely followed and hold more significance for audiences abroad than they do back home. If delayed viewers are counted in future ratings, and if the ceremony begins inviting more presenters from abroad (and not just from the handful of films nominated), that international audience may well be the Oscar ceremony’s best bet for the future.

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Images, from top: This year's International Oscar (among other categories) nominees Sentimental Value (Neon), The Secret Agent (Neon), It Was Just An Accident (Neon), Sirat (Neon), The Voice of Hind Rajab (Willa), and Parasite director Bong Joon-ho in 2020 (Oscars.org).