With this year's Oscar nominations, foreign-language films have gone mainstream

Non-English language films Anatomy of a Fall, The Zone of Interest, Past Lives, and Society of Snow all received Oscar nominations – three of them for best picture.

In 2020, Parasite made Oscars history as the first non-English language film to win best picture. Weeks earlier, director Bong Joon-ho had joked while accepting the Golden Globe for best foreign language film that "once you overcome the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles, you'll be introduced to so many amazing films". Four years later, Academy voters seem to have taken Joon-ho's advice, with more foreign-language films nominated for best picture than ever before.

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The 2023 best picture Oscar nominations saw two international, foreign-language films included in its nominees as well as one American but partially foreign-language production. While this may not seem like a striking figure, it’s a new record in the Academy’s 96-year history, in which no more than one foreign-language film has ever been nominated for best picture in any given year.

Justine Triet's Anatomy of a Fall, a French courtroom drama that debuted at Cannes, where it won the Palme d'Or, was nominated for best picture, as well as in four other categories, including best director and best original screenplay. Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest, a German-language, UK-produced Holocaust drama that also debuted at Cannes, earned a best picture nod as well as four additional nominations, including best director, best international feature film and best adapted screenplay. The best picture category this year also includes Celine Song's Past Lives, a drama about lost love that plays out in both Korean and English.

Michael Schulman, author of Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears, believes there are a few factors driving the rise in foreign-language films being nominated in major categories – one of those being the #OscarsSoWhite campaign that kicked off in 2015 as a hashtag started by activist and writer April Reign to protest the Academy's failure to recognise the achievements of people of color across the industry. 

"In the wake of #OscarsSoWhite in 2015 and 2016, the Academy made this huge effort to diversify and expand its hip," Schulman tells BBC Culture. "And a lot of the attention went to the fact that they were bringing in more women, more people of color, and more younger voters. But there was also a real underappreciated push to get way more international , and so the Academy is much more global now." 

New York Times awards season columnist Kyle Buchanan agrees, calling the increasingly international makeup of the Academy "a byproduct of the organisation’s drive to diversify itself in the wake of #OscarsSoWhite".

"The Academy has invited a large swath of talent based outside the United States to its ranks," Buchanan tells BBC Culture. "And you can see their tastes reflected in a slate of nominees that stretch from Hollywood to beyond."

In other words, with a more global set of voters, you see a more global set of films being recognised for the Oscars' highest honors, such as the best picture category. In the decades prior to this shift, non-English language films were nearly always relegated to the "best foreign language film" prize, a category that was retitled to "best international feature film" in 2019. Schulman notes that even the most influential non-English language films of the 20th century – including the works of Federico Fellini and Ingmar Bergman – almost never cracked the best picture category, with Bergman only once getting a single best picture nomination for Cries and Whispers in 1973.

Schulman believes the altered category name for best international feature film was another key sign of changing winds amid Academy voters: "The word 'foreign' – foreign to whom">window._taboola = window._taboola || []; _taboola.push({ mode: 'alternating-thumbnails-a', container: 'taboola-below-article', placement: 'Below Article', target_type: 'mix' });