Art by all, accolades for all: Bad Bunny, Jafar Panahi and the English language’s monopoly on Academy Awards
Paul Swartz - Voice Editor
Graphic by Paul Swartz
After nearly seven decades of ceremonies, the 68th Grammys awarded Album of the Year to an album in a language other than English for the first time in the show’s history.
Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny broke the glass ceiling, with his 2025 masterpiece “DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS” taking home the award, before he performed it at the Super Bowl LX halftime show just a week later.
Bad Bunny’s meteoric rise to the top of the pop culture landscape is a timely one, and the recognition for foreign language albums at the Grammys is long overdue.
But when it comes to Academy Awards shows, the Grammys are forward-thinking.
It took the Emmys 76 years before a foreign language show won the ceremony’s Best Drama award when “Shōgun” took home the trophy in 2024. “Maybe Happy Ending,” although performed in English on Broadway, became the first production originally written in a language other than English to win the Tony for Best Musical, capturing the award at the 78th Tonys last year.
While the Oscars awarded Bong Joon Ho’s “Parasite” with Best Picture in the distant past of 2019, its status as the oldest Academy Award ceremony meant it still took 92 years for a non-English language movie to win the most prestigious award in film.
The Oscars introduced the category for Best International Feature Film (originally called Best Foreign Language Film) at the 29th Oscars in 1957. It still took them over six decades to give one of those movies Best Picture.
Awards shows are taking strides toward rewarding foreign-language art, but there’s still a long way to go.
The Oscars nominated two non-English language films in the Best Picture category this year, but of the 10 possible lead performance nominees, only Wagner Moura’s in “The Secret Agent” is in a language other than English.
Awards shows are massive opportunities for art to reach audiences it otherwise wouldn’t. Siloing that exposure to primarily English-language art robs us of the opportunity to discover the incredible stories that other countries, cultures and languages can produce.
Take the 2025 movie “It Was Just An Accident.” Written and directed by Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, the movie seemed poised for a Best Picture nomination. Instead, the tenth slot went to “F1,” an already commercially successful American movie.
Panahi made “It Was Just An Accident” despite a ban on movie production in Iran and is currently serving a one-year prison sentence for the film’s production. If it were up for Best Picture, it would’ve gotten more recognition and a wider theatrical release as the other nominees did.
Instead, he sits in prison for making a movie that almost nobody can see.
Art is as accessible as ever. But to access art, you have to know about it and where to find it. Awards shows can offer massive opportunities to international artists who desperately need them, but they still seem too comfortable rewarding the safe options.
As Bong Joon Ho said in his 2020 Golden Globes acceptance speech, “once you overcome the one-inch tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films.”
The barrier to equitable art exposure is an almost entirely imagined one. All awards shows have to do is push through the illusion.
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Art by all, accolades for all: Bad Bunny, Jafar Panahi and the English language’s monopoly on Academy Awards
After nearly seven decades of ceremonies, the 68th Grammys awarded Album of the Year to an album in a language other than English for the first time in the show’s history.
Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny broke the glass ceiling, with his 2025 masterpiece “DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS” taking home the award, before he performed it at the Super Bowl LX halftime show just a week later.
Bad Bunny’s meteoric rise to the top of the pop culture landscape is a timely one, and the recognition for foreign language albums at the Grammys is long overdue.
But when it comes to Academy Awards shows, the Grammys are forward-thinking.
It took the Emmys 76 years before a foreign language show won the ceremony’s Best Drama award when “Shōgun” took home the trophy in 2024. “Maybe Happy Ending,” although performed in English on Broadway, became the first production originally written in a language other than English to win the Tony for Best Musical, capturing the award at the 78th Tonys last year.
While the Oscars awarded Bong Joon Ho’s “Parasite” with Best Picture in the distant past of 2019, its status as the oldest Academy Award ceremony meant it still took 92 years for a non-English language movie to win the most prestigious award in film.
The Oscars introduced the category for Best International Feature Film (originally called Best Foreign Language Film) at the 29th Oscars in 1957. It still took them over six decades to give one of those movies Best Picture.
Awards shows are taking strides toward rewarding foreign-language art, but there’s still a long way to go.
The Oscars nominated two non-English language films in the Best Picture category this year, but of the 10 possible lead performance nominees, only Wagner Moura’s in “The Secret Agent” is in a language other than English.
Awards shows are massive opportunities for art to reach audiences it otherwise wouldn’t. Siloing that exposure to primarily English-language art robs us of the opportunity to discover the incredible stories that other countries, cultures and languages can produce.
Take the 2025 movie “It Was Just An Accident.” Written and directed by Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, the movie seemed poised for a Best Picture nomination. Instead, the tenth slot went to “F1,” an already commercially successful American movie.
Panahi made “It Was Just An Accident” despite a ban on movie production in Iran and is currently serving a one-year prison sentence for the film’s production. If it were up for Best Picture, it would’ve gotten more recognition and a wider theatrical release as the other nominees did.
Instead, he sits in prison for making a movie that almost nobody can see.
Art is as accessible as ever. But to access art, you have to know about it and where to find it. Awards shows can offer massive opportunities to international artists who desperately need them, but they still seem too comfortable rewarding the safe options.
As Bong Joon Ho said in his 2020 Golden Globes acceptance speech, “once you overcome the one-inch tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films.”
The barrier to equitable art exposure is an almost entirely imagined one. All awards shows have to do is push through the illusion.