The BAFTA and Oscar Nominations Reflect Our International Production Landscape

We’re gearing up for awards season. with the Bafta Film Awards next month, where the great and the good of the movie world will vie for the British equivalent of the Oscars, followed by The Academy Awards on March 2nd, with the nominations announced this week.

It’s always something I look forward to and what I love especially this year is that three of the films which feature heavily in the nominations are multilingual and multinational. Much like me: I’m a Hungarian who came to London in 2007 to study and work and I’ve stayed here ever since. 

In fact, the nominations demonstrate the increasing globalisation of movies, and indeed, TV. I’m talking about Emilia Perez, which is set in Mexico, with a screenplay in Spanish, written and directed by a Frenchman; Anora, which is mostly in Russian and Armenian with English subtitles, and Kneecap, the fabulous self-titled tale of the Irish Gaelic hip hop trio.

The nominations follow the success in September of TV drama Shōgun, which became the first Japanese-language series to win an Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series, before it went on to land four Golden Globes at the start of January, including Best Television Series. 

We’ve come a long way already since Parasite won Best Picture at the 2020 Oscars, the first non-English language film to do so in history of the awards, making global headlines in the process. 

You only need look at the nominations for this year’s Academy Awards. Emilia Perez, Anora and Brazilian film I’m Still Here are both up for the top award of Best Picture, previously, a category traditionally dominated by those in the English language, and Emilia Perez is up for a whopping 13 nominations in total.  Meanwhile multiple award-nominated The Brutalist explores the story of a (fellow) Hungarian immigrant, for which actor Adrian Brody drew on his own family’s origins. 

It seems we’re in a golden age, where popular and critically acclaimed films and TV shows are now increasingly international in origin, from Scandi noir to Korean dramas to French comedies and everything in between.  

As with many things, you could argue the internet started it. Social media sees all nationalities talking to each other instantly without borders with instant immersion in other cultures. Auto captions on online videos are what we’re used to. 

Then the birth of streaming turbo boosted the trend. At first, platforms were most likely filling libraries with foreign shows and movies simply for sheer content. But then, they could see viewers were seeking out foreign productions or those not in their mother tongue. So, streamers started buying more and commissioning their own, and their algorithms increasingly served them up, which has only whetted the audience’s appetite. It’s meant increasingly globalised high-quality movies and TV shows. 

With me, my gateway drug was Squid Game. I loved it so much, I started seeking out other Korean shows, then started onto Japanese stuff, Spanish stuff, Bollywood and beyond. 

While American all-pervading cultural global dominance may never be truly vanquished, it’s certainly being challenged and it’s a wonderful thing to see. 

Of course, if you delve into the history of Hollywood, you’ll see that it’s always been a melting pot and never truly an all-American endeavour anyway - just look up the influence of European filmmakers, actors and more who fled to California in the 1930s (Michael Curtiz, director of the 1942 classic Casablanca, was Hungarian). And of course, we’ve always watched foreign language films - only today, they’re no longer the preserve of the arthouse.

Naturally, in areas where multiple languages rub shoulders with each other, like in Europe or Asia, foreign language TV and films have always been more the norm. I grew up in Budapest watching Italian TV shows and Turkish soaps, all dubbed which was par for the course then.

But even back in my home country, where dubbing once ruled, subtitles are now embraced, and increasingly used by everybody, not just those with a hearing impairment. A recent survey found 61% of viewers aged 18-25 turn them on even if they’re watching a film or TV show in their own language, with some saying they can’t concentrate unless they’re on.

This has all helped fuel the globalisation trend of film and TV, which has naturally created new opportunities for filmmakers in less traditional areas outside of Hollywood, such as in Scandinavia, East Asia and Latin America. The landscape is now culturally less homogenised, which can only be a good thing.

There’s an increasing realisation that good content can be produced anywhere, so it makes sense to have a diverse workforce to deliver it, that’s broad geographically too. It’s why my post-production company POD has a studio in Budapest, where many films are now being made, alongside our international workforce of freelancers working for global clients like PepsiCo, Wayfair and Estée Lauder.  

We can draw on our talent pool of more than 1,400 artists from around the world who can deliver on projects in more than 20 languages. To produce for a global audience, you need a global team, and this globalisation will only heighten that need. 

But it’s beautiful to see this ever-evolving linguistic and geographical democratisation of the art of film and TV, which has ultimately led to increased diversity on screen, more diverse stories, greater cross-cultural understanding, greater creativity and more global cultural enrichment.

After all, every culture has something unique to bring. So bring on the further globalisation of film and TV, bring on the Baftas and Oscars, and bring me a bucket of wasabi-flavoured popcorn while I watch them.