‘Drive My Car’ Win Best International Feature Oscar Award

Web Desk — Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s “Drive My Car” won Best International Feature at the 94th Academy Awards. The Japanese film is only the second film from that country to win this prize competitively, following 2008’s “Departures.”

Japan previously won three Honorary Oscars before the (previously named) Best Foreign Language Film category was instituted for films from 1956. 

Those honorees were Akira Kurosawa’s “Rashomon,” Teinosuke Kinugasa’s “Gate of Hell,” and Hiroshi Inagaki’s “Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto.”  

Driving My Car was far and away the favorite to win Best International Feature at Academy Awards 2022, and it is one of the most acclaimed films of the year, overall. It competed with Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s animated Danish entry “Flee,” Paolo Sorrentino’s “The Hand of God” (Italy), Bhutan’s “Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom” by Pawo Choyning Dorji, and Norway’s “The Worst Person in the World” by Joachim Trier.

Hamaguchi’s film was a sensation from the moment it debuted at Cannes 2021, where it picked up Best Screenplay (for Hamaguchi and Takamasa Oe), the FIPRESCI Prize, and the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury. It won Best International Feature at the Gotham Awards, Best Film outright at the New York Film Critics Circle Awards, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards, and the National Society of Film Critics.

“Drive My Car” is also nominated in three other categories at the Academy Awards: Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Director for Hamaguchi, and Best Picture.