Hollywood celebrated a deeply political film with six Oscars and said absolutely nothing about why it mattered. Almodóvar noticed, and he’s not staying quiet about it.
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Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar has never been one to bite his tongue, and his latest comments prove that hasn’t changed. Speaking to the Los Angeles Times ahead of his upcoming film ‘Bitter Christmas’ at the Cannes Film Festival, the acclaimed director took direct aim at the 2026 Oscar ceremony, calling out what he sees as a troubling and deliberate political silence from Hollywood’s biggest night.
Almodóvar noted that the Oscar telecast this year was conspicuously short on voices speaking out, either against the ongoing war in Gaza or against Donald Trump. For a director whose entire career has been built on fearless storytelling, the quiet felt deafening.
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Asked why he thought the room stayed so silent, Almodóvar didn’t mince words: “People are obviously very afraid.”
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He went further, stating plainly that he does not believe the United States is a functioning democracy at this moment, not fully, and not honestly. He acknowledged that some might call it an imperfect democracy, but said he doesn’t even buy that framing.
Among the sea of acceptance speeches and glittering gowns, Almodóvar said there was one moment that stood out, and it came from a fellow European. He singled out his friend Javier Bardem as perhaps the only person at the ceremony who directly spoke up, saying “Free Palestine” from the stage.
That a single Spanish actor was the most politically outspoken person in a room full of Hollywood’s elite was not lost on Almodóvar. It underlined exactly the point he was making, that the industry’s biggest stars went home that night without saying much of anything that mattered.
When the Los Angeles Times asked whether he worries that speaking this openly might cost him professionally, Almodóvar’s answer was blunt: “Not at all.”
He explained that his Spanish background gives him a certain freedom, noting that Spain as a country has officially called the situation in Gaza a genocide, and that Spanish people broadly are not afraid to name difficult things for what they are. Working outside the Hollywood system, he said, makes it easier to be direct.
This isn’t the first time Almodóvar has trained his sights on Trump, either. Back in 2025, while accepting the Chaplin Award at Lincoln Center in New York City, he described Trump as ruling through narcissistic authority with no regard for human rights. He later said the president would be popular in history as a catastrophe.
What made the ceremony’s political evasiveness even harder to ignore was the film sitting at the center of the evening. Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘One Battle After Another’, a film with contemporary American politics woven into its very DNA, walked away with six Oscars including Best Picture, yet the speeches around it barely touched on what the film was actually about.
Film critics and press members widely noted that the ceremony felt “overly safe,” and that audiences tuning in without prior knowledge of the film would have had no idea it was a piece of politically charged art.
Meanwhile, Almodóvar is turning his focus forward. His new film ‘Bitter Christmas’, starring Barbara Lennie and Victoria Luengo, is heading to competition at the Cannes Film Festival, the same festival where he won the directing prize for ‘All About My Mother’ back in 1999.
At 75, Almodóvar remains one of the most decorated and uncompromising voices in world cinema. Whether Hollywood listens or not, he has made one thing abundantly clear: the silence at this year’s Oscars was not something that went unnoticed, and to him, it was not something that should go unchallenged.
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