So close, yet so far: India’s long Oscars wait

Without any public row and driven largely by international recognition, Neeraj Ghaywan’s Homebound has made it to the Academy’s shortlist in the Best International Feature Film category for the 98th Oscars. India is now waiting to see if it will become the fourth Indian film – after Mother India, Salaam Bombay! and Lagaan – to secure a nomination in the category. The film’s overseas momentum since its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2025 offers some hope, reinforcing the idea that international acclaim often becomes the currency of an Oscar campaign.With final nominations set to be announced on January 22, we trace how the category works and why India’s long pursuit of the coveted statuette has remained elusive. What makes a film eligible to compete How the selection and nomination process worksOnce a country’s selection committee submits its official entry, the Academy’s International Feature Film administrators verify that the film meets all eligibility criteria. After this due diligence, the International Feature Film Committee oversees the nomination process, conducted in two rounds:Preliminary round: Academy members who volunteer for the process are invited to watch all eligible submissions. Each participating member must view a minimum number of films (as defined by the Academy). Members then vote by secret ballot for up to 15 films. The 15 films with the highest number of votes advance to the next stage – the shortlist. Nominations round: All active and life members of the Academy are invited to view the 15 shortlisted films. To have their votes counted, members must watch all 15 shortlisted films. Each member then votes, ranking up to five films in order of preference. The five films with the highest votes become the final nominees in the category.Final voting: The final voting for the winner is conducted among active and life members who have watched all five nominated films.In a 2024 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Aamir Khan shared that it is important to create hype about one’s film to ensure the Academy’s committee watches your film. He said, “Essentially, for the International Films and Documentary categories, there are separate committees of the Academy members. The catch is that they commit to watching 80% of the films assigned to them, and we have to ensure that we get them to watch our film.” If there are rules that the committee members should watch all the films, argued Aamir, then the filmmakers wouldn’t have to spend money on the film’s campaigning to score a nomination.The foreign films category was introduced in 1956, renamed to ‘international’ films in 2019The first Academy Awards were held in 1929, but it wasn’t until 1947 that the Academy began recognising foreign-language films released in the United States. Even then, the honour was sporadic – a single non-English film was chosen each year, without any formal nominations. The first such award was won by the French film Monsieur Vincent in 1948. That changed in 1956, when the Academy introduced a competitive category called Best Foreign Language Film. The first nominees included The Captain of Kopenick (West Germany), Gervaise (France), Harp of Burma (Japan), and Qivitoq (Denmark), and the winner was Federico Fellini’s La Strada (1954).In April 2019, the category was renamed Best International Feature Film. “We have noted that the reference to ‘Foreign’ is outdated within the global filmmaking community,” the Academy’s subcommittee explained at the time, “We believe that International Feature Film better represents this category and promotes a positive, inclusive view of filmmaking as a universal art form.”As per the Academy, an international feature is “a feature-length motion picture (over 40 minutes) produced outside the United States of America and its territories with a predominantly (more than 50%) non-English dialogue track.” Submitted films can be live-action narrative films or animated or documentary features.India’s journey in the categoryIndians, counting technical awards, have won 10 Oscars in the awards’ history. However, despite the country’s long and rich cinema tradition, in the Best International Feature Film category, only three Indian films have scored nominations and no wins yet. Mother India (1958): A year after the Academy constituted a separate category for foreign language films, Mehboob Khan’s Mother India was submitted as India’s first official submission to the Oscars in 1958. However, despite Khan being hailed as ‘The DeMille of India’ in the West, the filmmaker missed the chance to hold the golden statuette. The film lost to Italian producer Dino de Laurentiis’ Nights of Cabiria by a single vote. Salaam Bombay! (1988): In 1989, Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay! was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the 61st Academy Awards. Though the film didn’t win the award, it won other international accolades, including the Caméra d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival. Nair, over the years, has maintained, “The audience is my Oscars.” Lagaan (2002): Aamir Khan’s groundbreaking 2002 cricket saga Lagaan, helmed by Ashutosh Gowariker, also scored a nod. The actor shared that the biggest task for them during the Oscar campaign was ensuring that the committee members didn’t miss watching the film. Though their campaigning helped them score a nomination, it didn’t win. But Aamir was happy with the film’s widened reach. “The people who had no clue what Lagaan was all about also saw the film,” he had said. A history of controversial choicesIndia’s Oscar selections have often sparked debate for favouring locally popular or politically safe films over those with international acclaim.In 1960, the Film Federation of India (FFI) chose not to send Mughal-e-Azam – now hailed as a cinematic masterpiece – to the Oscars at all. Decades later, its screenplay was added to the Academy’s library, a belated nod to what was once overlooked.Since then, the pattern has often been repeated. Jeans (1998) was picked over Dil Se and Satya; Paheli (2005) over Swades and Black; and Eklavya (2007) over Dharm, despite Dharm winning accolades at Cannes and Palm Springs. The film’s director Bhavna Talwar even took the matter to the Bombay High Court, alleging bias in the selection process. In 2013, Ritesh Batra’s The Lunchbox, a Cannes favourite with a global distributor, was controversially snubbed for The Good Road, prompting questions about whether FFI truly understands the Oscar race. More recently, RRR (2022) was forced to seek independent submission after Pan Nalin’s Last Film Show was chosen. The Gujarati-language film is among the five Indian films to ever be shortlisted in the international category, but it didn’t make the final nominations. In 2024, Kiran Rao’s Laapataa Ladies was preferred over Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes. Three-time Grammy winner Ricky Kej summed up the long-standing frustration, “We live in a ‘mainstream Bollywood’ bubble. We should look for great artistic cinema – star or no star, big or small – that’s uncompromising in its vision.”It is not enough for a film to be named India’s official entry. Producers and filmmakers need to advertise in trade publications, spend on publicity, organise screenings, and ensure that, at the very least, their film gets noticed. A jury that watches films from across the world is likely to lean towards titles that already have visibility.