The 2026 Academy Awards saw few overt political statements.
Though the Best Picture win for One Battle After Another, about revolutionaries in the US, suggests that Hollywood’s minds might have been on politics, acceptance speeches broadly avoided controversial topics.
Mr Nobody Against Putin, which follows a schoolteacher documenting the propaganda his students are exposed to in a small Russian town, was an exception to that rule: Accepting the award for Best Documentary, its director David Borenstein warned against governments “[murdering] people on the streets,” a reference to both Russian oppression and recent US events.
The film itself has attracted controversy: Ukrainian writers complained that it paints Russian citizens as naive and passive, rather than complicit in Moscow’s war on Ukraine.