The Academy Award for Best Documentary went into checked baggage at JFK — and never came out. The airline later found the Oscar and is returning it.
NEW YORK — The Oscar statuette belonging to the co-director and subject of this year’s Academy Award-winning documentary “Mr. Nobody Against Putin,” disappeared after TSA officials at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport refused to allow him to board a flight with it, insisting the trophy could be used as a weapon.
After Lufthansa conducted a search, they found Pavel Talankin’s Oscar and said they will return it, according to Talankin’s co-director David Borenstein.
Talankin told Deadline he has flown more than a dozen times with the Oscar since his film won Best Feature Documentary in March. But when he arrived at a security checkpoint at JFK’s Terminal 1 on Wednesday, a TSA agent told him he could not take the 8.5-pound statuette on board.
Borenstein took to Instagram to draw attention to the incident, tagging both Lufthansa and the TSA.
“I’ve looked and I can’t find a single other case of someone being forced to check an Oscar,” Borenstein wrote. “Would Pavel have been treated the same way if he were a famous actor? Or a fluent English speaker?”
“It’s completely baffling how they consider an Oscar a weapon,” Talankin told Deadline from Frankfurt, Germany, where he arrived Thursday morning on a Lufthansa flight. He said he has flown with it in the cabin on multiple previous flights across several airlines.
Talankin contacted executive producer Robin Hessman, who speaks Russian, to help translate as he negotiated with TSA and Lufthansa agents.
“The woman from TSA was absolutely intractable,” Hessman told Deadline. A Lufthansa agent attempted to resolve the standoff by offering to escort Talankin to the gate while holding the Oscar, but TSA rejected that plan as well.
Talankin said he had no suitcase to check, so Lufthansa gave him a cardboard box instead. As he filmed on his phone, two Lufthansa agents bubble-wrapped the Oscar, attached a tag to the item and took the box to stow with other checked baggage. When Talankin landed in Frankfurt, the box was nowhere to be found.
“He calls me this morning from Frankfurt saying Lufthansa doesn’t have it. They lost it,” Hessman told Deadline. “He has a ticket number for the box, and they can’t find it.”
Lufthansa said it deeply regretted the situation and was conducting an urgent, comprehensive internal search for the award.
“We will do everything we can to find the Oscar as fast as possible and have already escalated this,” the airline said in a comment on Borenstein’s Instagram post.
On Friday, Borenstein posted an update from the airline that said the Oscar had been located and will be returned.
“Mr. Nobody Against Putin” tells Talankin’s story as a primary-school teacher in a small town in the Ural Mountains who documented Moscow’s efforts to indoctrinate young students with nationalist propaganda in support of the war in Ukraine. Borenstein secretly recorded footage as the school’s videographer and smuggled it out via an encoded web application.
The film premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival and won Best Documentary Feature at the 2026 Academy Awards.
If the Oscar had been confirmed stolen or permanently missing, it would have joined a small, notorious list of missing statuettes — including Hattie McDaniel’s, absent for more than 50 years, and Matt Damon’s, which he lost in a flood in 2002.