Oscar Seasoning: The Year of Sandra Hüller

2026 has been a great year to be Sandra Hüller. She had four major releases (and is set to appear in an as-yet-unknown role in Avengers: Doomsday), one of which was her first American blockbuster, and she won the Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance  at the Berlin Film Festival. Since making her debut in 2006, she's built up a mightily impressive filmography that's made her one of Germany's most acclaimed actors. 2024 saw her become the first German Best Actress nominee since Luise Rainer in 1937, and this year, she's being pushed for both lead and supporting thanks to a little bit of category fraud.

Hüller was victorious at the Berlinale for Rose, Markus Schleinzer's drama about a woman who disguises herself as a man to declare herself the heir of an abandoned farm in a remote village. It’s a Haneke-esque exploration of gender roles and the stifling confines of Christian patriarchy, with Hüller absolutely dominant in every scene she occupies. She can be showy, but Hüller at her most effective is quiet, sinewy, unflappable and often unreadable. You get the sense of a woman who has never revealed her true self to anyone, and with that comes a kind of power. That can be a bad thing, as seen in The Zone of Interest, where she plays a Nazi officer’s wife whose casualness conceals a monstrous ego. With Rose, the liberation offered by trousers and bear killing is aspirational. But she still must tread a fine line between the visible performance of macho manhood and being inconspicuous enough as to not attract too much scrutiny.

It's one of two acclaimed leading performances for her in 2026. The other is in Fatherland. Directed by Paweł Pawlikowski, the filmmaker behind Ida and Cold War, this is a biopic of the German author Thomas Mann that takes place during his return to the country after the Second World War. Accompanied by his daughter Erika, played by Hüller, he goes to Frankfurt to accept a prestigious award, then crosses the border to the East to accept another prize from the opposite end of the political spectrum. Both East and West desire to appropriate Mann, one of the nation’s most important writers, for their own means. He wants his art to both rise above borders and be a unifying force for a fractured nation.

Erika, his confidante, is forever by his side. She translates for him at press conferences, even though he speaks English and French pretty well. She picks out his outfits, drives him around the countryside, and is his companion while everyone tries to get a piece of him. Returning home is messy. Her beloved brother Klaus is living in Cannes and is hesitant to reunite with his father on old soil. The trip puts her face to face with her garbage ex-husband who sold out to the Nazis for fame as an actor (Mephisto, which her brother wrote, is based on him.) People keep sending her father threatening letters, calling him a traitor for fleeing Germany in her hour of need. But it’s Erika’s job to keep calm and carry on, to put on, well, not a happy face but one of efficiency and business-as-usual. If there’s one thing Hüller excels at, it’s the quiet judgment of someone who knows she’s one of the smartest people in the room. That and cigarette acting. She’s on Maggie Cheung in In the Mood for Love levels here!

Erika Mann is 100% a leading performance. I would hazard a guess that she’s in the film more than Hanns Zischler, who plays Mann himself. But I wasn’t surprised to hear that MUBI, which is releasing both Rose and Fatherland, is promoting her as supporting for awards season. See, she’s Thomas Mann’s daughter, and she supports him, so it’s not a lead role, guys! The audacity! Category fraud is always contentious in the Oscar race. Sometimes it’s more blatant than others, like Viola Davis going Supporting for Fences. Other times, you see the logic, even if the screen time numbers don’t add up, like Rooney Mara in Carol or Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz in The Favourite.

MUBI is doing this because it wants to land Hüller double nominations. We all know that, and I doubt voters will care if they’re already Team Sandra. Supporting might be more crowded than lead right now. She’d be up against the Odyssey duo of Anne Hathaway and Samantha Morton, Penelope Cruz in The Invite and La Bola Negra, Kate O’Flynn in Tender Loving Care, the women of Elsinore, and [SPOILER.] But she can still make the cut if the passion is there.

She’s got the visibility from having such a major year. Project Hail Mary was a critical and commercial success, and is, at this moment in time, still in contention for a Best Picture nomination. That category is filling up quickly, and sci-fi action fare is not always guaranteed a slot (especially if you have to fight Dune: Part Three for the slot), but in the battle for awards, visibility is key. Hell, even Digger might help her. Sure, it sucks, it lost money, and she’s not very good in it (in fairness, she had nothing to work with), but that movie still has its fans in the industry who want to fight for Iñárritu’s vision.

International films still struggle to get a foothold with Oscar voters. Post-Parasite, they continue to fight for crumbs. Actors who break out tend to have either Hollywood name recognition with English-language performances or are headlining the one foreign movie breakout that gets all the attention. Hüller has been here before with Anatomy of a Fall, which was nominated in Picture, Director, and Original Screenplay (which it won.) She was also speaking English for a lot of that movie, but it’s a hell of a lot easier to get a second nomination than it is a first. In terms of actresses for whom English is a second/third/etc. language, Hüller is now a big name with Cotillard/Cruz potential.

Given how sparse the Best Actress race is right now—a sharp contrast from previous years where contenders were plentiful—it wouldn’t be unfeasible to imagine Hüller getting in with an international film. There’s a solid case to be made for other non-English performances breaking through in the category too. Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto won Best Actress at Cannes for All of a Sudden, the new film by Ryuichi Sakomoto. Renate Reinsve speaks English and Norwegian in Fjord, the Palme d’Or winner. Léa Seydoux has Gentle Monster and The Unknown, although the former is way easier to sell to audiences than the latter, despite both being dark as hell. Possible Love by Lee Chang-dong has Jeon Do-yeon. I've seen a couple of awards prediction slates with more non-English language performances than the opposite, which would be super cool. But right now, I also think the far-and-away frontrunner for Best Actress is Julianne Moore, who is an absolute riot in The Debut. I’ll have a review of that one up once it premieres.

I would love to see Hüller dominate the season, if only because she’s both extremely talented and it’s always entertaining to see a very blunt, zero-bullshit German woman navigate pure Hollywood nonsense with a barely contained eye-roll. And frankly, I want more international performances to get their dues. It’s ridiculous how America-and-UK-centred the Oscars continue to be when access to foreign cinema has never been more open.