The 2020’s: International Cinema’s Breakout Decade Across Awards Season

For so many years, the Oscars and awards season more widely have been solely focused on Hollywood’s own output or those from the UK. While of course both countries have offered huge amounts to cinema’s history, it feels isolating given the cinematic achievements of other nations, intrinsic to the fabric of modern cinema. This shifted drastically when Bong Joon-Ho’s Parasite won four major awards in 2020 including Best Picture and Director. However in the years since, we have seen more regular love shown for films not in the English language, with Edward Berger’s All Quiet on The Western Front and Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car nominated in a swathe of major categories. The 2025 awards season has seen several films including Emilia Perez, I’m Still Here and Flow among the leading contenders.

For so long, the best international films were relegated to technical categories with rare exceptions in categories like Director or Screenplay. 2018 and 2019 feel like breakthrough moments with Roma’s win in the directing category and wins leading up to the Oscars. Paweł Pawlikowski was also nominated alongside Cuaron for his stellar period romance Cold War. There are outliers like when Pedro Almodóvar was nominated for Best Director and Screenplay in 2002 and Francois Truffaut in the same categories in 1973 but these were certainly outliers at the time.  

In fact since 2018. Every year, bar 2022 we have had at least one international film in the Director category from Thomas Vinterberg for Another Round to Ryusuke Hamaguchi for Drive My Car and in 2024 Justine Triet for Anatomy of A Fall. It certainly feels like the Director category is no longer an all-American/British affair, with real representation of the best cinema from Europe, Asia and beyond. Even in 2022 it was somewhat of a surprise that Edward Berger didn’t get a nomination given he won the BAFTA for best Director, with the film widely recognised elsewhere.

The same can be said of Screenplay categories, Anatomy of A Fall won the Original Screenplay award in 2024 while Zone of Interest was nominated in Adapted Screenplay and the two previous years saw All Quiet On The Western Front and Drive My Car leading contenders in that category. The Worst Person In The World also made it into the Original Screenplay category in 2022 and while no international films feature this year, alongside Adapted it has shown signs of progress in recent times.

2024 and 2025’s Best Picture lineup’s have both seen multiple international films and All Quiet On The Western Front was a leading contender throughout awards season in 2023. It feels far less like tokenism to include international films with so many major categories featuring diverse stories. This is one of the largest benefits of The Academy expanding its nominee field from 5 to a maximum of ten films and with this larger pool of films we can expect more breadth year in year out.

While Emilia Perez has had its fair share of controversy, the film’s 13 Oscar nominations is a towering achievement bolstered by the love for films like I’m Still Here which has marked itself out as a contender for Best Picture, with strong support in its native Brazil. The number of films from Europe, Asia and Latin America in Best Picture line-ups in recent years and across other major categories is certainly refreshing to see. BAFTA has also given two films from outside the UK and US Best Picture in the past decade (Roma and All Quiet) so it certainly feels like films of all shapes and sizes from across the globe are becoming a genuine part of the awards conversation. Long may this continue to be the norm.