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Current Affairs

Oscar goes missing after director forced to check it on flight: ‘could be used as weapon’

After being forced to check his Academy Award on a transatlantic flight, recent winner Pavel Talankin’s Oscar went missing before an airline tracked it down…

By Samantha Johnson / May 1, 2026

After being forced to check his Academy Award on a transatlantic flight, recent winner Pavel Talankin’s Oscar went missing before an airline tracked it down two days later.

Talankin, who co-directed the best documentary winner Mr Nobody Against Putin, did not expect to have to check his statuette for a flight from New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport bound for Frankfurt, Germany, on Wednesday.

But a Transportation Security Administration agent said it could not go on board.

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“At the airport, a TSA agent stopped him and said the Oscar could be used as a weapon,” Talankin’s co-director, David Borenstein, said on Thursday night in a social media post.

“Pavel didn’t have a bag to check it in, so the TSA put the Oscar in a box and sent it to the bottom of the plane,” Borenstein added. “It never arrived in Frankfurt.”

Pavel Talankin, winner of the award for documentary feature film for “Mr Nobody against Putin”, attends the Governors Ball in Los Angeles in March. Photo: AP
Pavel Talankin, winner of the award for documentary feature film for “Mr Nobody against Putin”, attends the Governors Ball in Los Angeles in March. Photo: AP

After Borenstein’s announcement prompted an international outcry, the airline Lufthansa on Friday said it had found the lost Oscar.

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