One of the Best International Features of the Year Should’ve Been Nominated for Best Picture

1 week ago 9

Published Feb 3, 2026, 7:00 PM EST

Thomas Butt is a senior writer. An avid film connoisseur, Thomas actively logs his film consumption on Letterboxd and vows to connect with many more cinephiles through the platform. He is immensely passionate about the work of Martin Scorsese, John Ford, and Albert Brooks. His work can be read on Collider and Taste of Cinema. He also writes for his own blog, The Empty Theater, on Substack. He is also a big fan of courtroom dramas and DVD commentary tracks. For Thomas, movie theaters are a second home. A native of Wakefield, MA, he is often found scrolling through the scheduled programming on Turner Classic Movies and making more room for his physical media collection. Thomas habitually increases his watchlist and jumps down a YouTube rabbit hole of archived interviews with directors and actors. He is inspired to write about film to uphold the medium's artistic value and to express his undying love for the art form. Thomas looks to cinema as an outlet to better understand the world, human emotions, and himself.

'Tis the season for snubs, a word that wouldn't have nearly as much prominence in the English language without the Academy Awards. The Oscars are perhaps more synonymous with the movies they ignore, and the vitriol received online for said snubs, than they are with honoring the finest cinematic work in Hollywood and around the globe. The recent announcement of the nominees for the 98th Academy Awards ceremony was significant in many ways, notably with Sinners' record-breaking 16 nominations and the addition of a new category in Best Casting. Along with surprise nominations for Kate Hudson for Best Actress and F1 for Best Picture, snubs continued to dominate headlines, from Chase Infiniti's dismissal in Best Actress to Wicked: For Good being completely shut out. The most egregious snub, It Was Just an Accident, is obvious to most cinephiles. Jafar Panahi's film seemed inevitable for a BP nod, but the Academy did the Iranian thriller wrong.

'It Was Just an Accident' is a Thrilling Piece of Entertainment

The Cannes Film Festival has proven to be a strong precursor to the Oscars, two ceremonies that used to rarely overlap. Until this past Thursday, four of the last five Palme d'Or winners (Cannes' top prize) earned Best Picture nominations, including wins for Parasite and Anora. For Jafar Panahi, the iconoclastic filmmaker banned from directing movies by his own government, 2025 winner It Was Just an Accident signaled that he was set to make the leap into mainstream reverence.

Landing on many publications' predictions for Best Picture and Best Director, Oscar prognosticators and consumers were shocked to find It Was Just an Accident and Panahi snubbed, only receiving nods for Best Original Screenplay and Best International Feature Film. While most of the major candidates are accomplished and worthy films, a few entries that ostensibly took their spot are questionable, to say the least. It's hard to watch F1, a solid summer blockbuster that evaporates from your memory upon leaving the theater, and argue that it deserves a slot in Best Picture over something as truly daring and urgent as Accident.

Neon's other Oscar contenders, The Secret Agent and Sentimental Value, landed in the Best Picture race instead. While both terrific, they are often inscrutable, emotionally and thematically, threatening their viability with voters. However, It Was Just an Accident is a shotgun blast of visceral entertainment that offers familiar but invigorating beats of classic thrillers. Compared to Panahi's previous work, politically-charged neorealist films that blend narrative and documentary, such as This is Not a Film and Taxi, his latest is certainly his most accessible and mainstream. The social and political subtext is woven into the fabric of Accident, but casual viewers will be delightfully entertained by Panahi's slick black humor and nerve-wracking tension, aspects that are essential to all his movies, regardless of their weighty subjects.

The Cultural Implications of Nominating 'It Was Just an Accident' for Best Picture

It Was Just an Accident is a perfect rebuttal to the fallacy that foreign cinema is inherently too arty and inaccessible. Following a traumatized mechanic who encounters and kidnaps a man he suspects to be his cruel former captor in jail, the film immediately grabs the viewer by asking, "What would you do in this scenario?" Panahi, channeling the thrillers of Alfred Hitchcock, places the audience in the mind of our protagonist, Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), where we watch him grapple with the severity of this morality fable. Is this a mistaken identity? Does the captor deserve a second chance? Is revenge justified? These are fundamental principles of morality that speak to all nations, backgrounds, and languages. The propulsive momentum forces you to wrestle with these dilemmas on the fly, creating a vibrant, engaging viewing experience. Ruminating over the political implications, notably Panahi's own battles with the Iranian government, is the icing on the cake of this delicious confection.

The Oscars missed a golden opportunity to reward not just an exceptional film in It Was Just an Accident, but an entire nation. Iranian cinema is gravely overlooked by awards bodies and film culture at large, and no director underlines the bold and striking artistic backbone of the country like Jafar Panahi. Similar to its American counterparts like Sinners and One Battle After Another, the film is a timely reflection of contemporary society and our uneasy relationship with our own history, art, and political backdrop. For years, the Academy has shown concern about being irrelevant and out of touch. Nominating an act of staunch independence and creative liberation in It Was Just an Accident would demonstrate the invaluable power of the medium.

It Was Just an Accident is now available to rent or buy on VOD services.