5 min readMar 20, 2026 09:04 AM IST
First published on: Mar 20, 2026 at 06:15 AM IST
No to war. And a free Palestine.” So said Javier Bardem at the Oscars this year, before he, along with Priyanka Chopra Jonas, presented the award for the Best International Feature to Joachim Trier for Sentimental Value. The applause that greeted this sentiment was deafening.
Two years ago, the same award became the occasion for another political statement. Accepting the trophy for The Zone of Interest, filmmaker Jonathan Glazer called out the “hijacking” of the Jewish identity and the Holocaust by “an illegal occupation”. It had been just six months since the October 7 attack by Hamas and Israel’s disproportionate response as it reduced Gaza to rubble. Applause greeted this speech, too, but as the camera panned across the room, it showed an audience that was largely — and stubbornly — silent.
There is something ritualistic about how the same debate surfaces every year: Were the Academy Awards “too political”? The show has certainly had such moments in the past, most famously when Michael Moore attacked US President George W Bush at the 2003 ceremony, shortly after the US attacked Iraq. He was met with open hostility from a large section of the audience, as was Bert Schneider, winner of the 1975 documentary feature award for the anti-Vietnam war film Hearts and Minds, when he read out a telegram from the Viet Cong delegate to the Paris peace talks. Or Vanessa Redgrave, when she received the Best Supporting Actress trophy for Julia in 1978, and used the platform to speak out against the “Zionist hoodlums” who had attempted to stop the release of her production, the documentary The Palestinian. Yet, none of these moments made the Oscars themselves political — the Academy has been careful about distancing the Awards from such “controversies”.
At this year’s ceremony, however, there was a noticeable shift. The Bardem moment was followed by Trier quoting the American writer James Baldwin in his acceptance speech, urging people not to vote for politicians who refuse to see that “all adults are responsible for all children”. In the press room, he expanded this into a condemnation of war, saying, “we’ve seen Palestinian children suffer, children from Ukraine suffer, from Sudan suffer, and there doesn’t seem to be any accountability at the moment”. Others, like Paul Thomas Anderson (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay), the teams behind The Voice of Hind Rajab (Best International Feature nominee) and Mr Nobody Against Putin (Best Documentary winner) used the stage and the red carpet to speak up against war, gun violence, discrimination and ICE.
Yet, speeches were only the first, and the least consequential, layer of Oscar politics this year. Operating just below the surface was the politics of the nominations themselves.
Consider the range of films recognised. Major contenders like One Battle After Another and Sinners were steeped in questions of historical violence, moral culpability, and social fracture. The trend was even more pronounced in the documentary categories, which have, since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, evolved into one of the Academy’s most overtly political arenas. This year’s nominees addressed war, displacement and the erosion of democratic institutions.
This was in large part because Hollywood itself appears to have become unusually attuned to the wider mood of disquiet and anxiety. Thanks to US President Donald Trump, a close — and thin-skinned — follower of the entertainment industry, Hollywood’s existence as a non-political bubble in a deeply polarised time is no longer viable. From the appointment of allies like Sylvester Stallone, Mel Gibson and Jon Voight as Washington’s “ambassadors” to Hollywood to the crackdown on late-night hosts like Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel who dare criticise the President, the unease in Los Angeles is evident.
Then there is the issue of Trump’s attempted restructuring of Hollywood through pressure on the studios — such as his ultimatum to Netflix over a Democrat sitting on its board — which brings us to the third and most consequential layer of Oscar politics: Control over narrative production. Hollywood is not a neutral marketplace of ideas. It is a capital-intensive industry in which a relatively small number of corporations determine what gets financed, distributed, and promoted. The growing consolidation within the industry has heightened anxieties about creative autonomy, particularly concerning the impending merger of Warner Bros. and Paramount Global, which has ties to the family of Trump ally Larry Ellison. It’s no wonder that, as this year’s Oscar host Conan O’Brien warned right at the start, it has all got so “political”.
The writer is senior assistant editor, The Indian Express. pooja.pillai@expressindia.com
Did this year’s Academy Awards reflect the political turbulence of their time? 
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