Joachim Trier becomes first Norwegian director to win an Academy Award. “I’m just a film nerd from Norway,” he told a standing Dolby Theatre.
The 98th Academy Awards ceremony at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood on March 15, 2026, produced many memorable moments. But for Indian cinephiles with a taste for world cinema — and for anyone who had been following this awards season closely — the presentation of Best International Feature Film was the one that felt genuinely historic.
Norway won its first Oscar.
Presented by Priyanka Chopra Jonas and Javier Bardem, the award went to Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value(Affeksjonsverdi), defeating a legitimately competitive field that included Brazil’s The Secret Agent, France’s It Was Just an Accident, Spain’s Sirât, and Tunisia’s The Voice of Hind Rajab. Sentimental Value was the seventh Norwegian film nominated for Best International Feature Oscar, but the country had never won until Sunday.
Trier accepted the award surrounded by his cast — Renate Reinsve, Stellan Skarsgård, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, and Elle Fanning among them. He began by saying “I’m just a film nerd from Norway,” adding that the win “means the world to me.”
Accepting the award, Trier acknowledged the film as a deeply collaborative effort involving more than a thousand contributors across the production. He closed his speech by paraphrasing the American writer James Baldwin: “All adults are responsible for all children,” adding a direct message about political accountability.
The nine nominations were themselves historic, making Sentimental Value the most-nominated Norwegian film in Academy history by a significant margin. The win in the International Feature category was widely predicted by the time Oscar night arrived — the BAFTA win in the same category had served as the clearest signal — but the weight of it still registered. As the Norwegian Oscar Committee observed when selecting the film as Norway’s submission, Trier is “a filmmaker who is confident, assured, and fully at the height of his storytelling talent.”
Skarsgård was separately nominated for Best Supporting Actor — a category he ultimately did not win, with the award going elsewhere — but his nomination was itself historic. He became the first Best Supporting Actor nominee in Oscar history from an international film, breaking a barrier that had stood for 97 years of the Academy Awards.
The film is currently available on MUBI India, where it has been streaming since February 13, 2026. Expect a significant surge in viewership in the days following the Oscar win — this is exactly the kind of film that deserves a post-win audience.
Historic Academy Award data sourced from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Norwegian film history sourced from the Norwegian Film Institute official records.
Published: March 18, 2026 | By Abhishek, MovieRamen
