Sandra Hüller Will Campaign for Fatherland in the Oscar Supporting Race

Sandra Hüller will campaign for Fatherland in the supporting actress category at the Oscars, Variety reported on Monday. Her co-star Hanns Zischler will also be pushed in the supporting categories, with Mubi, the film's US distributor, running the awards campaign.

A campaign is the organised effort a studio or distributor makes to win the attention of Academy voters, through screenings, interviews and advertising. The supporting categories honour performers in roles that sit behind the leads. Hüller has already been put forward in supporting for Fatherland across the season's guild and awards ceremonies, including the Golden Globes and the Actor Awards, which used to be called the SAG Awards. She was also nominated for outstanding supporting performance at the Gotham Awards.

The film is a black-and-white postwar drama directed by Paweł Pawlikowski. Hüller and Zischler play Erika and Thomas Mann, the writer and his daughter. Pawlikowski's earlier film Cold War was nominated for three Oscars in 2018, including best director. Poland submitted Fatherland for the international feature race in September.

Hüller is also working a second race. Mubi is distributing Rose, Austria's official entry in the Academy Awards' international feature category, and Variety reports that she will be campaigned in the lead actress category for that film. That puts her in two different categories for two different films in the same season.

The Oscars rules have also changed for the 99th ceremony. An actor can now earn more than one nomination in the same category, as long as each performance ranks among the top five vote-getters. Before this change, only an actor's highest-placing performance could advance to a nomination in a given acting category.

Hüller earned her first Best Actress Oscar nomination in 2024. Gold Derby, a site that tracks awards odds, has said that a nomination for Rose would be her second in that category. In October, the same site reported that her odds for Rose had overtaken her odds for Fatherland at the Oscars and the Golden Globes.

Away from awards season, Variety reported in October that Hüller will make a cameo appearance in Marvel's Avengers: Doomsday, a short role in one of the studio's large-scale superhero films.