Yesterday’s Oscars brought a shiny, glamorous conclusion to awards season. In the current political climate, it can feel odd watching rich actors fight for golden statues in months-long press tours. I, for one, have lost count of how many celebrities I have watched eat chicken on YouTube in the last few weeks—and I have only myself and overworked publicists to blame.

 

But this critique isn’t new, and the victorious entertainers don’t always help make the event seem at least a little grounded. After winning a Golden Globe for ‘box office achievement’ earlier this year (yes, you read that right), Wicked director Jon M. Chu claimed that making the Universal Pictures-backed musical was a “radical act.” His speech sounded vapid at worst, naïve at best. How, then, can we justify the importance of awards shows? “It’s just harmless entertainment,” “It’s a matter of tradition,” “It’s just an industry event that happens to be televised,” I hear my fellow desperate Oscar-heads cry out. But there’s one category in particular that makes the whole pageant worth it to me. This Sunday, I was anxiously waiting not for the announcements for Best Picture, Best Actor, or Best Director, but for the results of Best International Film.

 

It was around 3. A.M UK time when I let out a patriotic scream, momentarily forgetting my poor flatmates in the rooms next door. Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here had just been announced the winner of the category and, in the blink of an eye, all my reservations about the Oscars seemed to have magically disappeared. But this was not mere national pride.

 

Let me explain: theorist Fredric Jameson argues that Global South literature can often be read as national allegory. His point is generalising and reductive at moments (can’t we write about anything else?) but it’s also useful to the argument I want to make here. An Oscar nomination for an international film helps platform that movie’s way of imagining its country, letting that national allegory shine on an even bigger stage. To get an Oscar nomination is to get international validation that this is a national narrative with weight behind it—which can, and does, affect change in our domestic spheres. And winning? Oh, that’s an even bigger deal.

 

It is sad that it is a majority American institution that holds this power to validate national narratives, but it is quite a common phenomenon all the same. It hurts me to admit it, but I’m not sure I’m Still Here would have been the success it was back home in Brazil without the praise it received at festivals abroad. This is not me trying to undermine domestic agency and paint us as mindless followers of American tastes, but the movie’s international accolades have, even if slightly, helped the movie receive more attention. And, with more eyes glued to the screen, the movie has fueled a reconsideration of the country’s collective memory.

 

In the mainstream Brazilian narrative, we’ve tried our best to pretend the 1964 coup did not happen, as if holding our hands up and saying ‘Let’s give amnesty to both sides and just not talk about sad things anymore.’ However, by depicting the real-life consequences of the torture and disappearance of political dissident Rubens Paiva on his family, the film dares the public to finally look at the scars that the twenty years of military rule left on the country. I’m Still Here now holds a cultural influence that few Brazilian films have ever reached; it is an example of entertainment as a radical act.

 

Not only do the Oscars awarded for Best International Feature Film shift domestic narratives, but also the international gaze. Parasite’s history-making win in 2019 highlighted a narrative of South Korea that went deeper than the country’s usual soft-power exports. The Oscars helped ensure it was not only Bong Joon-ho fans and Cannes-savvy cinephiles who got to see the biting portrayal of the Park family’s mindless exploitation of its employees, a commentary  that in turn deepened international viewers’ understanding of Korean class differences.

 

However, it is no wonder why the Best International Film nomination process is so rife with controversy. Is it just a coincidence that Payal Kapadia’s wonderful All We Imagine as Light, with its “subtle reproach to the Hindu-nationalist politics of the Modi government,” did not get chosen by the Indian committee? Governments and independent committees themselves seem to recognize the power of the Oscars in uplifting a narrative and often take this into account when selecting which movie to put forth as a contender.

 

So why have I, and so many other Brazilians, been so invested? It’s not only international recognition, though that doesn’t hurt; it’s the push that an Oscar nod and win give to the national narrative this movie portrays. Brazil is not a country of hedonistic abandon and eternal sunshine, but one with a deep and uncomfortable history that cannot be ignored any longer. And I’m Still Here helps people see that, be it at home or abroad.

 

The Oscars are silly— no amount of analysis is going to get me around that. We can all agree that hearing about how “art is resistance” from self-congratulatory liberals in Los Angeles is difficult to stomach. But we cannot let the messengers allow us to forget the importance of the Oscars as a potential stage for genuinely great, radical art. It wasn’t just my friends who watched I’m Still Here: it was my grandmother, my cousins, and my neighbors back home. And if that movie we’ve all heard “such good things about” has made us think more about our history, even if only a bit, this little appreciation should mean a lot to us.∎

 

Words by Luisa Blacker. Image courtesy of Free Malaysia Today.