“Come to Brazil?” The Oscars Just Might

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 Paolo, 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.