Why These Oscars Mean So Much to Brazil

New York Times

28-02-2025

The streets of Rio de Janeiro have been littered with Fernanda Torres imitators.
They drink beer, clutch plastic Oscars and deliver the impromptu acceptance speeches that they hope their idol, the Brazilian actress Fernanda Torres, will give on Sunday night at the Academy Awards.
'It's the peak of fame in Brazil: to become a costume of Carnival,' Ms. Torres said at a film festival in California this month, referring to her many impersonators during pre-Carnival celebrations over the past several weeks.
Ms. Torres was already widely famous in Brazil, but now she has become the nation's star of the moment for achieving something that has long eluded most of her peers and predecessors here: international recognition.
Since winning a Golden Globe for best actress last month, she has been on an international Oscars campaign for 'I'm Still Here,' the Brazilian film about a mother of five navigating the disappearance of her husband during Brazil's military dictatorship.
Ms. Torres is nominated for best actress while the film is up for best international feature and — in the first such nomination for a Brazilian movie — best picture.
Those accolades, as well as the widest U.S. release ever for a Brazilian film, has made it a certified cultural phenomenon in Brazil. There has been intense online support, blanket media coverage and screenings by the president.
The result is a feeling of national pride more commonly reserved for the national soccer team. That is because, to many across this country of 200 million, Brazil's first major Oscar would represent a meaningful validation of a culture that has long awaited its proper due.
'I know French culture, I know American culture, I know Russian culture, German culture, Italian culture, but they don't know much about Brazilian culture,' Ms. Torres, 59, said in a recent interview that went viral in Brazil. 'We lack this communication with the world, and on the other hand, Brazil feels sorry that the world doesn't know what we know.'
For generations, Brazil has given rise to a vast, vibrant tapestry of art, music, literature and film — some of it masterful and much of it deeply original — that has been widely celebrated inside this immense nation and hardly known outside it.
Yes, the Brazilian actress Carmen Miranda and her fruit hat became a Hollywood sensation in the 1940s — though in part by reinforcing Latino stereotypes — and then Bossa Nova broke through in the 1950s. But since then, Brazilian culture has often been defined abroad by soccer, samba and Carnival — despite it being much, much more.
One obstacle has been language. The Brazilian pop star Anitta has recently begun reaching a broader audience, but only by singing in Spanish and English.
'Brazil is continental in size, but we speak Portuguese, the language of a small country, a language barely recognized in the world,' Caetano Veloso, the Brazilian music legend, said in an interview.
Mr. Veloso has created more beauty with that language than almost anyone. My colleague, the longtime New York Times music critic Jon Pareles, has called Mr. Veloso 'one of the greatest songwriters of the century,' while David Byrne of Talking Heads has said of him: 'When people ask me which musicians I admire, he is always first on the list.'
It seems then that another challenge has not been the quality of Brazil's art, but its exposure.
Quentin Tarantino, Spike Lee and Martin Scorsese are all avowed fans of Brazilian cinema. Yet Mr. Scorsese said he had to discover it in a museum. He then became 'obsessed,' he said, calling the 1969 Brazilian film 'Antonio das Mortes' by Glauber Rocha 'one of the high points of my film-going experience.'
Kurt Cobain and Beck said they were inspired by the Brazilian psychedelic rock band Os Mutantes. Paul Simon and Sting have praised the Brazilian singer Milton Nascimento. And Stevie Wonder is a fan and frequent collaborator with Gilberto Gil, whom these pages have also called 'one of the world's great songwriters.'
In 2020, the American author Dave Eggers discovered a new translation of the 1881 novel 'The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas' by Machado de Assis, the inventive Brazilian writer. Mr. Eggers was stunned and wrote: 'It is a glittering masterwork and an unmitigated joy to read, but, for no good reason at all, almost no English speakers in the twenty-first century have read it.'
Well, it may not be a good reason, but the reality is that, for generations, the West has generally viewed the cultural output from poorer countries as less relevant or important.
That is in part why Brazilians have largely been relegated to the 'global music' and Latin categories of the Grammys, and the foreign-language category of the Oscars.
This year has brought exceptions. At the Grammys, Mr. Nascimento was nominated for best jazz album with the American jazz musician Esperanza Spalding. Yet at the ceremony, organizers seated him far in the back while putting Ms. Spalding up front, prompting her to protest.
At the Oscars, Ms. Torres is the second Brazilian to ever receive a best acting nomination. The first? Her mother, 25 years ago. Fernanda Montenegro, Brazil's most celebrated actress, was nominated in 1999 for her role in 'Central Station,' a Brazilian film by Walter Salles, the same director behind 'I'm Still Here.' She lost to Gwyneth Paltrow, a decision that is decried in Brazil to this day.
Now Brazil prays for redemption, including with the prize for best picture. It is only the second time a Latin American film has received the nomination, after the 2018 Mexican film 'Roma,' which lost.
The recognition 'represents a lot for Brazil,' Mr. Veloso said. 'We tend to exalt our country in songs, but we have a very large inferiority complex.'
Brazilians often call that phenomenon the 'complexo de vira-lata,' roughly translated as the 'mutt complex,' a term coined in the 1950s by the Brazilian playwright Nelson Rodrigues, originally referring to Brazil's mixed-race identity and its tendency to view itself as inferior to richer nations.
'Perhaps because our European colonizers always saw us as an inferior people, this stigma has stuck to the country's soul,' said Fernando Meirelles, director of the 2002 film 'City of God,' one of the few other Brazilian movies to earn an Oscar nomination, including for best director. 'To this day, we depend on external approval to deal with our low self-esteem.'
Even Ms. Torres admitted that she has internalized such views. When asked about her fellow nominees after her Golden Globe victory last month, she responded, laughing, 'Everybody deserves it. Everybody. So I don't know why they chose this street dog that speaks Portuguese.'
In Brazil, millions believe she deserves the awards — and are showing it. The five most commented posts on both the Oscars and Golden Globe official Instagram pages are now about 'I'm Still Here,' including one post about Ms. Torres that has drawn nearly 850,000 comments — 100 times more than any other Oscars post not related to Brazil.
And on Sunday, for the first time ever, Brazil's main television network will pre-empt the live broadcast of Rio de Janeiro's famed Carnival samba parade to show the Oscars instead.
'We are a force of 200 million people,' Ms. Torres said. 'So when someone transcends those borders and takes something personal to us to the outside, it's this kind of feeling of: Look at how rich we are, look at what we have.'