Oscars: ’Drive My Car’ Makes History As First Japanese Film Nominated For Best Picture

Stealing the SAGs spotlight! HoYeon Jung, Ariana DeBose and more stars made their mark on the 2022 awards show.

One for the record books! Squid Game swept the 2022 Screen Actors Guild Awards with wins in nearly every category it was nominated for on Sunday, February 27 — and in doing so, earned a place in Hollywood history.

EXCLUSIVE: Sonia Yuan, who stars in Japan’s first Best Picture Oscar nominee Drive My Car, has signed with Artist International Group for management.

EXCLUSIVE: CODA, the film that traveled the longest road among the Best Picture nominees, will get a new surge. Apple and its Original Films division will re-release the inspirational film for free in theaters from next Friday, February 25 through Sunday, February 27. All free screenings to feature open captions to be fully accessible to the deaf and hard-of-hearing

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau ChiefThe Osaka Asian Film Festival has unveiled its biggest ever program – a total of 76 films – to unspool next month (March 10-20, 2022).Its competition section includes the acclaimed Korean debut film “Aloners,” which offers an exacting critique of the alienating effects upon life of modern capitalist economies; Hong Kong biopic “Anita”; the world premiere of “Angry Son,” which combines LGBT and mixed race themes in a heartwarming comedy; Kong Dashan’s new take on “Journey to the West,” as a ragtag group of people on a UFO hunt; “Mama’s Affair,” the second film by Kearen Pang, whose 2017 debut “29+1” won Osaka’s audience award, “No Land’s Man” from Mostofa Sarwar Farooki and festival circuit hit “Barbarian Invasion.” The spotlight section includes ten titles. Among them are “The Ground Beneath her Feet” from Bangladesh’s Mohammad Rabby Mridha; “A Room of Her own” from China’s Xie Yiran; and Carlo Francisco Manatad’s “Whether the Weather is Fine.”The largest component section is the twenty-title Indie Forum, a platform for Japanese indie films that allow the winner to claim the Japan Cuts Award.

NEW YORK -- In his Oscar-nominated performance in “CODA,” Troy Kotsur has one spoken line, but it’s a good one. Urging his daughter, played by Emilia Jones, to pursue her dreams of singing and attending college, he says aloud: “Go!”For Kotsur, that one line meant lots of rehearsal plus the courage to, on a film set, speak dialogue he couldn’t himself hear. But Kotsur had also done it before.

The secret is out!Sofía Jirau is making us all proud as she becomes the first Victoria’s Secret model with Down Syndrome. The Puerto Rican have been dreaming about this moment for years, and now she can open the door for more people with special needs.“I dreamed it, I worked for it, and now it is a dream come true.

EXCLUSIVE: German actor Saralisa Volm makes her directorial debut with mystery thriller The Silent Forest, which is premiering tonight at the Berlin Film Festival in the Perspektive Deutsches section. Here’s an exclusive clip from the film.

only playing in select theaters.However, just in time for the Oscars on March 27, “Drive My Car” is getting a streaming release next month on HBO Max. The service revealed Monday that “Drive My Car” will be streaming on HBO Max starting March 2, as a result of WarnerMedia OneFifty acquiring the drama for streaming.Directed and co-written by Ryusuke Hamaguchi, “Drive My Car” is based on the short story of the same name by Haruki Murakami and follows a widowed actor/director (Hidetoshi Nishijima) as he makes a multilingual production of “Uncle Vanya” in Hiroshima while also dealing with the sudden death of his wife.

Weekend grosses popped higher for Oscar Best Picture nominees led by Licorice Pizza, Belfast and Drive My Car.

Elsa Keslassy International CorrespondentVictoria Bedos, the creator and co-writer of “La Famille Belier,” the hit French movie that was remade into Sian Heder’s Oscar-nominated “CODA,” is getting ready to make her feature debut with Focus Features/Universal in France.For her directorial debut, “Leo et moi,” Bedos will once tell the bittersweet story of a teenager set against an unusual backdrop, a theme she probed in “Famille Belier.” “Leo et moi” (working title) is produced by Hélène Cases at Lionceau Films and follows 14-year-old Marie-Luce Bison, who lives with her widowed father at a group home for seniors in rural France. Universal will distribute the film in theaters in France and Focus Features has global rights.In the film, Marie, growing up as an outsider surrounded by elderly people and her distant father, isn’t like anyone else at school and the other kids notice it.

Elle Driver has acquired world sales rights outside Spain and France to “La Maternal,” the second film from Pilar Palomero.Palomero’s 2019 film “Schoolgirls” (“Las niñas”) made her only the fifth first-feature director to win a Spanish Academy best picture Goya.BTeam Pictures is handling distribution in Spain.“Schoolgirls” also won Goyas for director, original screenplay and cinematography (Daniela Maciela), establishing Palomero as a leading light of Catalonia’s newest — and often female — generation of cineastes, making movies that are grounded in authentic local realities, but alert to broader social trends.Produced by Spain’s Inicia Films (“Schoolgirls,” Carla Simon’s “Summer 1993”) and BTeam Prods., “La Maternal” sees Palomero once more explore the borders between child and adulthood. Billed as a “sensitive and heartbreaking journey into teenage parenthood,” the film follows a pregnant Carla, fleeing social ostracism, eventually arriving at La Maternal shelter.There, she’ll learn to live with her teen classmates and prepare to be a mother.

EXCLUSIVE:  Lionsgate has renewed its first-look film deal with 3Pas Studios, the production company run by producer Ben Odell and bilingual star Eugenio Derbez, Deadline has learned.

Mark Schilling Japan CorrespondentThe Oscar nominations for “Drive My Car,” Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s three-hour drama about a man dealing with the death of his wife, have thrilled the director’s native Japan.News of the four Academy Awards nominations was reported by all major Japanese media, from the most serious Nikkei business daily to the sports tabloids whose usual coverage of local art films is zero.The news also lit up Twitter.“An Academy Award nomination for Best Picture is a great accomplishment. I think the melding between Haruki Murakami and Chekhov has created a universality that can be felt around the world,” said Twitter user YasioE.“I really want it to win the Best Picture award, don’t you? Judging from the state of the awards race, I think it can win it.

Beginning with our review coverage all the way back to the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, through Cannes in July, Venice and Telluride in the late summer, and finally to late-breaking holiday-season releases that qualified just under the gun for Oscar eligibility, Deadline has been on the front lines of opinion for this year’s eventual 10 nominees for Oscar Best Picture.

Denzel Washington’s nomination for best actor in the Joel Cohen film The Tragedy of Macbeth marks him as the most nominated Black actor in Oscar History, with ten nominations and two wins. 

Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s Neon film Flee made history this morning, as it became the first ever to score a trifecta of Oscar nominations in the categories of Best Animated Feature, Best Documentary Feature and Best International Feature Film.

Sian Heder’s family drama CODA broke ground this morning as both the first Apple Original, and the first feature led by a predominantly dead cast to land a Best Picture Oscar nomination.