Photo/Illutration A scene from “Drive My Car” ((c) 2021 "Drive My Car" production committee)

Director Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s “Drive My Car” entered cinematic history by becoming the first Japanese film to win an Oscar nomination for Best Picture.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which hosts the Academy Awards, announced Feb. 8 that the movie received four nominations, including one for best international feature, at the 94th Academy Awards.

Hamaguchi was nominated for best director and best adapted screenplay along with scriptwriter Takamasa Oe.

Just four years after making his debut as a commercial film director, Hamaguchi, 43, achieved what even internationally acclaimed Japanese filmmakers Akira Kurosawa and Kenji Mizoguchi couldn’t.

Hamaguchi’s works have received prizes at European international film festivals, such as those in Locarno and Berlin.

“Drive My Car” also became the first Japanese film to win the Best Screenplay Award at the Cannes International Film Festival last year.

But in those cases, prizes are chosen by only a few judges. For the Academy Awards, nearly 10,000 film artists vote to select the nominees. To win an Oscar, a film needs to appeal to popular taste in addition to being artistic.

“Drive My Car” is an adaptation of international bestselling author Haruki Murakami’s short story of the same name. The cast included household names such as Hidetoshi Nishijima and Masaki Okada.

But its plot is complicated as the film shows scenes of rehearsals for a play, almost as if it was a play set within a play. “Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy” is another of Hamaguchi’s works, and regarded as much simpler. It won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2021.

And yet, “Drive My Car” won the Oscar nominations due to a more diverse lineup of judges.

From 2015 through 2016, all 40 nominees in major acting categories were Caucasians. The Academy Awards came under fire online under the hashtag “OscarsSoWhite.”

It also came to light that white, elderly males accounted for a large portion of the Academy members with voting rights to choose the nominees.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences jumped to address the issue by significantly expanding the membership and relaxing eligibility to include women, nonwhites and other nationalities.

Those efforts were soon paid off.

In 2020, South Korean director Bong Joon-ho’s “Parasite” won four Academy Awards in major categories and became the first foreign language film to win the Oscar for Best Picture.

Last year, Chloe Zhao, a Chinese filmmaker who lives in the United States, won three Academy Awards in major categories for her work “Nomadland,” while Youn Yuh-Jung, a veteran South Korean actress, won the Oscar for best supporting actress for her role in “Minari.”

The Academy used to have five films on its shortlist for Best Picture but increased the number in 2010. Ten movies received the nomination this year. The change was not specifically aimed at increasing diversity as a human rights issue but has contributed to securing diversity. That unquestionably helped “Drive My Car” to win the nominations.

Over the past quarter of a century, only Hirokazu Kore-eda, Naomi Kawase, Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Takeshi Kitano have won recognition for actively producing internationally acclaimed works.

Each of them took a different approach to support the development of next-generation directors, including Hamaguchi, who studied filmmaking under Kurosawa and Kitano at the Tokyo University of the Arts’ Graduate School of Film and New Media.

Japan’s film industry has lagged behind its South Korean rival. Expectations remain high for the long-awaited next-generation leader in Japanese cinema.

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