“Come to Brazil?” The Oscars Just Might
If you are the type of Oscars obsessive who sets an early alarm on nominations morning (guilty!), you may have noticed something curious last month: before the announcement began on the Academy’s Instagram Live, the comments were already filling up with Brazilian-flag emojis. And for good reason. “The Secret Agent,” the acclaimed film by the director Kleber Mendonça Filho, walked away with four nominations—not just Best International Feature, for which it was Brazil’s official submission, but also Best Picture, Best Actor (Wagner Moura), and a brand-new category, Best Casting. (Adolpho Veloso also became the first Brazilian nominated for Best Cinematography, for his work on “Train Dreams.”) This came a year after “I’m Still Here,” Walter Salles’s elegant political drama, was nominated for Best Picture and Best Actress (Fernanda Torres) and brought home the country’s first win in the international category—a breakthrough that inspired euphoria in the streets of Brazil, where Carnaval was in full swing.
Brazil’s cannonball into the Oscars race isn’t an anomaly. After the #OscarsSoWhite scandal, a decade ago, the Academy brought in thousands of new members, becoming not just more racially diverse but more geographically sprawling. More than a fifth of Oscar voters are now outside of the United States. Perhaps as a result, foreign films have been breaking out of the international category and competing all over the Oscar map, from the Korean thriller “Parasite,” which, in 2020, became the first non-English-language film to win Best Picture, to India’s “RRR,” which, in 2023, won Best Original Song, for the ecstatic earworm “Naatu Naatu.” Global entries now consistently bust into the Best Picture race, among them “Drive My Car” (Japan), “All Quiet on the Western Front” (Germany), “Anatomy of a Fall” (France), and last year’s problem child “Emilia Pérez,” a Spanish-language French musical set in Mexico. This year, “KPop Demon Hunters” is poised to win Best Animated Feature and Best Original Song, and Norway’s “Sentimental Value” received nine nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director (Joachim Trier). The Oscars, once a Hollywood-centric industry function, are now closer to the Olympics.
But there’s something different about Brazil: a nationwide Oscars fever that is exuberant, competitive, and extremely online. Brazilians are notably active on social media—it’s the third-biggest country on TikTok, after the U.S. and Indonesia—and the country is home to a vocal stan culture. In 2024, when X was temporarily blocked there, amid a legal dispute between Elon Musk and the Brazilian Supreme Federal Court, countless fan accounts for celebrities such as Ariana Grande and Taylor Swift evaporated, many signing off with the hashtag #MeuUltimoTweet. Moura, who is from the state of Bahia and came up in Brazilian telenovelas, has an unofficial theme song that pulses over his fans’ adoring posts: O Kannalha’s “O Baiano Tem o Molho,” which means “The Bahian Has the Sauce.” “Brazilians on the internet are very mischievous,” Beatriz Izumino, who covers culture at the daily paper Folha de São Paulo, told me. “Nobody really talks like us. Nobody really writes like us. So whatever happens, it’s kind of an internal joke just for us.”
That humor can become vengeful if provoked. Last year, the Spanish actress Karla Sofía Gascón, of “Emilia Pérez,” was nominated for Best Actress against Fernanda Torres, one of Brazil’s most beloved movie stars. In an interview with a Brazilian outlet, Gascón speculated that Torres’s team was trying to tear her down; Brazilian fans swiftly rallied against her. After a Canadian journalist resurfaced offensive tweets from Gascón’s past, Brazilians amplified the scandal online, turning the 2025 Oscar race into something like a Brazil-vs.-Spain soccer rivalry. “The Oscars became the World Cup for us,” Rodrigo Teixeira, a producer of “I’m Still Here,” told me. After Torres won the Golden Globe, Teixeira took a LATAM flight from L.A. back to São Paulo, and the plane’s crew greeted him with applause. “It was like I won a gold medal. I thought, Jesus, what’s happening?” An Uber driver congratulated him; restaurants comped his meals. Two months later, after the Oscar win, the pilot on his flight back made an announcement that the “I’m Still Here” crew was onboard, and the entire plane erupted in cheers. At Carnaval, he and his collaborators were welcomed home “like the Kardashians.”
Because Oscar season overlaps with Carnaval, Brazil’s cinematic triumphs inspire splashy celebrations IRL. Last year, people dressed up as Oscar statuettes and as Fernanda Torres. The ceremony was projected onto building walls, and the drag queen Pabllo Vittar interrupted his concert to show Salles’s acceptance speech. This year’s Carnaval featured a multitude of Wagner Mouras and even some Kleber Mendonça Filhos. (“It’s a normal tuxedo, and you put in gray hair—and you talk calmly, very educated,” Teixeira said.) Fabio Andrade, who teaches film at Vassar College, pointed me toward a video of one woman dressing up as a hairy leg protruding from a shark, a surreal image from “The Secret Agent.” Ilda Santiago, the executive director of the Festival do Rio, told me that her art-house-theatre chain is sponsoring a “Secret Agent” look-alike contest during Oscar weekend, a sequel to last year’s “I’m Still Here” contest, which drew “lines going around the neighborhood.” The Academy has reciprocated the attention; last fall, it held its first-ever event at Santiago’s festival, along with a dinner attended by the Academy’s C.E.O., Bill Kramer, and global luminaries such as Juliette Binoche.
If you’re not seeing this level of Oscar mania from, say, Norway, there are several reasons for it, among them Brazil’s recent political history, its prolific online fans, and other distinctions of national temperament. “We are very passionate people,” Aianne Amado, a film critic and an academic from Aracaju, told me. “We like to declare love.” Amado recently completed a Ph.D. studying Brazilian fan culture, which stems from the country’s glorious soccer history but has since latched onto international pop stars. Witness the proliferation of the catchphrase “Come to Brazil,” which took off in 2009 as an earnest plea to artists—Madonna, Justin Bieber—who might otherwise skip over the country on world tours. The phrase evolved into a self-aware social-media in-joke (the “RuPaul’s Drag Race” star Alaska Thunderfuck used it as a song title in 2017), and now plenty of musicians do go to Brazil, knowing that they’ll attract humongous crowds. This past May, Lady Gaga drew more than two million people to her free concert on Copacabana Beach.
Fandoms proliferated online in the two-thousands in Brazil, Amado said, when the country adopted the Google-owned social network Orkut, allowing even remote parts of the country to connect through pop culture; Amado herself was big in the Jonas Brothers community. Because Orkut was mostly confined to Brazil, it wasn’t particularly useful for contacting celebrities, but its insularity bred a spirited fan culture that exploded onto Tumblr, Facebook, and Twitter. Users there are now well versed in mobilizing a social-media mob: in 2020, Brazil’s version of “Big Brother” broke the world record for votes received by a TV show, at one and a half billion. “People really learned to use the digital tools to boost the participants,” Amado said. “So we already know how to cancel one of the participants and to boost one, and we are using the same tactics at the Oscars right now.”
The Gascón saga was just the start. Last month, Oliver Laxe, the French Galician director of “Sirāt,” blasted the Brazilian “ultra-nationalists” in the Academy, saying, “If the Brazilians submitted a shoe, they would all vote for it.” Brazilians flooded Laxe’s Instagram page with shoe emojis. But Amado thought that this response was relatively muted: “We can tell when people just want engagement using us. His movie is not that big, and he wants to use the Brazilian online power to create some moment for him.” Timothée Chalamet, who is competing against Moura for Best Actor, has wisely avoided a scuffle; in December, he promoted “Marty Supreme” at the C.C.X.P. convention, in São Paulo, and wrapped himself in a fan-made Brazilian flag with his face on it.
The worldwide success of “The Secret Agent” began last May, when it premièred at Cannes. Both Moura and Mendonça won prizes, and Neon picked up the film for North American distribution. “For the most part, Latin American filmmakers have to go to Europe and North America to get validation, in order to be imported back home,” Carlos Gutiérrez, who runs Cinema Tropical, a New York-based presenter of Latin American films, told me. “There’s a whole system with festivals that’s part of a geopolitical system that’s traditionally very Eurocentric. That’s why I think Brazilians are celebrating it so much, because it’s not very common that you have back-to-back films that are being celebrated both at European festivals and at the Oscars.”
That yearning for international acclaim has deep roots. In 1950, after Brazil suffered a traumatic loss to Uruguay in the World Cup (known as the Maracanã Smash), the Brazilian writer Nelson Rodrigues coined the term complexo de vira-lata, or “mongrel complex,” to explain the country’s nagging post-colonial sense of inferiority. That self-image as a nation of stray mutts (vira-lata literally means “can-flipper”), Amado told me, has led to a hunger for validation from abroad: “We always look up to the U.S. and to Europe, and we devalue ourselves.” In 2014, the shock of the Maracanã Smash seemed to repeat itself, when Brazil lost a semifinal to Germany, 7–1—on Brazilian turf, no less. “That killed Brazilian self-esteem,” Teixeira, the producer, told me. The country went into a funk. The soccer humiliation coincided with an economic crisis that halted years of growth, and with a political crisis that resulted in the impeachment of Brazil’s President, Dilma Rousseff, in 2016.
When Jair Bolsonaro subsequently won the Presidency, in 2018, on a MAGA-esque right-wing populist message, one of his targets was the arts, including cinema. “It was a big crisis, the first year that Bolsonaro was in power,” Ilda Santiago, of the Festival do Rio, recalled. “We basically had to do crowdfunding.” Before he was elected, Brazilian filmmaking had been gaining international traction. In 1999, Salles’s “Central Station” was nominated for Oscars in the foreign-film category and for Best Actress (for Fernanda Montenegro, who is Fernanda Torres’s mother). Five years later, Fernando Meirelles’s “City of God” received four nominations, including Best Director. Under Bolsonaro, state funding dried up, and the government painted artists as freeloaders wasting taxpayer money.
In 2022, Bolsonaro lost his reëlection bid to the former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, of the Workers’ Party; Bolsonaro has since been imprisoned for attempting a coup. Both “I’m Still Here” and “The Secret Agent,” which came on the heels of that welcome political upheaval, are set primarily in the nineteen-seventies and dramatize life under Brazil’s military dictatorship, which lasted from 1964 to 1985—a period that chimed with the Bolsonaro era, and whose horrors Bolsonaro glossed over in his stump speeches. “There was a tendency to paint the military dictatorship in a much more positive light, suggesting that the country was economically successful, that things were more organized, that there was progress, when the data shows completely otherwise,” Bruno Guaraná, a Recife-born film-and-television lecturer at Boston University, said. “And these films contest that.”
In Brazil, filmgoers tend to stick to Hollywood fare—“Lilo & Stitch” and “A Minecraft Movie” topped last year’s box-office—but “I’m Still Here” and “The Secret Agent” became homegrown hits that could remind Brazilians of their more recent brush with authoritarianism. (It’s no coincidence that both films have resonated in the U.S., where we have our own authoritarian menace to worry about.) An attempted conservative boycott of “I’m Still Here” fizzled. “Even people from the right wing came to see the film and loved it,” Teixeira, the producer, claimed. In 2019, Bolsonaro had censored Moura’s directorial début, “Marighella,” about a leftist revolutionary; last month, after Moura won the Golden Globe for “The Secret Agent,” Lula called to congratulate him, telling the actor that he was “a source of pride for this country, man.” “The Secret Agent,” like “I’m Still Here,” spotlights the endurance of the dictatorship’s victims, even after death. “The strength of these films is really connected to that feeling of survival,” Andrade, the Vassar professor, said.
Brazil’s once legendary soccer prowess, meanwhile, has seen better days. Teixeira—one of several people I spoke to who brought up that 2014 loss to Germany—theorized that the nationwide enthusiasm for the Oscars has filled the gap left by the World Cup. “Cinema is replacing soccer in the soul of the Brazilians, and that’s beautiful,” he said, beaming. “It’s a proud moment. Brazil is good in something. We are not bad anymore. We are good in films. We are good in art, and we are winning!” ♦