Unsuspectingly, Sunday night's Academy Awards turned into a kind of prism of global politics as Oscars were given out to Iranian and Pakistani films as well as to a film produced by a French director with French actors financed with French subsidies.

Richard Nixon had his “ping-pong diplomacy” with China. Maybe it’s time for Barack Obama to try a little “Oscar diplomacy” with Iran...Who knows? If a process of change can begin with a ping-pong paddle, maybe it can also begin with a golden statuette.

Iranians are heralding the country’s first Oscar win as the best public diplomacy for the Islamic Republic in many years. “Cinema,” the ex-president wrote to Farhadi in a public letter, “helps humanity to overcome aggression [and to be] able to bring hearts closer to each other.”

As the drive has accelerated it has helped give Ankara something it rarely had before: soft power, the allure of a country widely seen to be a success.

The United States and Europe used sanctions and public diplomacy to try to effect change in Burma. We cut off non-humanitarian funds, targeted the regime with stiff sanctions, and publicly challenged the junta on its human rights abuses.

This film presents an open door for the global audience to become involved in the Bahá'ís education advocacy movement in Iran. Awareness of the persecution these students face is a critical first step. The Education Under Fire campaign skillfully utilizes documentary filmmaking as a public diplomacy tool to address the needs of the Bahá'í in Iran.

“If you are going to tell people the truth, you better make them laugh; otherwise, they’ll kill you.”
-George Bernard Shaw

I used to think that humor was one thing that didn’t translate in cross-cultural communication. In my travels, I had watched numerous attempts at jokes fail miserably as they got lost in translation or cultural nuances. Things often ended awkwardly amid the seemingly untranslatable nature of humor.

Timothy H. Parsons in his book, The Rule of Empires, describes the Romans as “deft practitioners of soft power.” Rome preferred to rule the conquered and the potentially hostile through “semiautonomous client kings which the Senate euphemistically termed ‘friends of the Roman people.’