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Immigrants win four Oscars
Among the nominees and winners at the 2026 Academy Awards were five artists with an immigration background
By The Immigrant Times
At the 2026 Academy Awards (Oscars) five immigrants were honoured. They include Jessie Buckley as Best Actress and Wagner Moura, who won a nomination for Best Actor. Further winners include EJAE (Best Original Song), Chloé Zhao (Best Adapted Screenplay) and Ludwig Göransson (Best Original Score)
March 2026: The 98th Academy Awards (Oscars), held on Sunday, 15 March, at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, was a historic night for immigrants. Among the evening's winners and nominees, five artists share a story of crossing borders, adapting to new cultures, and ultimately reaching the very pinnacle of their industries.
EJAE
Oscar for Best Original Song & Best Animated Feature (KPop Demon Hunters)
Of all the evening’s immigrant success stories, none was more emotionally charged than that of EJAE, born Kim Eun-jae in Seoul, South Korea. After spending over a decade training at SM Entertainment with dreams of becoming a K-pop idol, she was told she was too old, too tall, and simply not good enough. Rather than give up, she moved to the United States and enrolled at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, reinventing herself as a songwriter and producer.
Her perseverance paid off spectacularly at the Oscars. The Korean-American artist won the Oscar for Best Original Song for ‘Golden’, the soaring centrepiece of Netflix’s animated blockbuster KPop Demon Hunters, a song she co-wrote and performed as the singing voice of lead character Rumi. It is the first K-pop song ever to win an Oscar, and the film also took home Best Animated Feature. “I moved here to the States and wanted to do more pop, and my dream was to have a Hot 100 hit song,” EJAE told Netflix. “Now to have it be a K-pop song that I was a part of with Korean lyrics in it means so much.”
Wagner Moura
Nomination for Best Actor (The Secret Agent)
Born in Salvador, Brazil, and raised in the small town of Rodelas in the state of Bahia, Wagner Moura became a household name in his home country through the crime thriller Elite Squad (2007) before moving to Hollywood. He broke through to international audiences in Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium (2013) and later captivated the world as Pablo Escobar in Netflix’s Narcos, famously learning Spanish for the role despite being a native Portuguese speaker.
In Hollywood, Moura was nominated for Best Actor for his performance in Kleber Mendonça Filho’s political thriller The Secret Agent, completing a remarkable awards run that included the Best Actor prize at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, a first for a South American actor. Now based in Los Angeles with his family, Moura has long been an advocate for greater South American representation in Hollywood.
Jessie Buckley
Oscar for Best Actress (Hamnet)
Jessie Buckley was born in Killarney, County Kerry, Ireland, and built her extraordinary career by moving to Britain, first to train at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) in London, and later making her home in Norfolk, England. As an Irish national carving out a life and career in the UK, she represents millions of Europeans who have crossed borders within the continent to pursue their ambitions.
Her Oscar for Best Actress, for her searing portrayal of Agnes Shakespeare, wife of the playwright, in Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, capped a stunning awards season that also brought her the Golden Globe and BAFTA for Best Actress. Critics have called it one of the great screen performances of this generation, and it is a triumph that belongs not only to Buckley, but to the rich tradition of Irish artistic talent that has long enriched British and international culture.
Chloé Zhao
Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay (Hamnet)
Born Zhao Ting in Beijing, China, in 1982, Chloé Zhao’s journey to Hollywood is the very definition of an immigrant story. Her parents sent her to a boarding school in England at the age of fourteen, before she moved again, alone, to Los Angeles to finish high school. She later earned a political science degree from Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts and a graduate degree in film from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts under the mentorship of Spike Lee.
Already an Oscar winner for directing and producing Nomadland (2021), Zhao picked up the Best Adapted Screenplay award on Sunday for Hamnet, which she co-wrote with novelist Maggie O’Farrell. The film, which she also directed, tells the story of Shakespeare’s family through the eyes of his wife. Zhao’s career, from making deeply American films as a Chinese immigrant to now a sweeping British historical drama, is a testament to the limitless creative possibilities that migration can bring.
Ludwig Göransson
Oscar for Best Original Score (Sinners)
Born and raised in Linköping, Sweden, Ludwig Göransson showed exceptional musical talent from an early age, studying at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm before making the move that would define his career by relocating to Los Angeles in 2007 to study film scoring at the University of Southern California. It was there that he met filmmaker Ryan Coogler, a partnership that would prove transformative for both men.
His collaboration with Coogler produced some of the most celebrated film scores of recent years, including Black Panther (2018) and Oppenheimer (2023), each of which earned him an Oscar. At this year’s Oscars, he collected his third Academy Award, for Best Original Score for Coogler's Sinners, cementing his reputation as one of the most gifted composers working in Hollywood today. The Swedish immigrant who arrived in Los Angeles with a suitcase and a passion for film music has become the soundtrack of modern American cinema.
Further reading from The Immigrant Times art section: Vilcek Foundation champions American immigrant in the arts and science || A film describes what Germany would look like without immigrants ||
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