EXCLUSIVE: Pasha Talankin’s Oscar for Mr. Nobody Against Putin has disappeared after TSA officials at JFK airport in New York refused to let him board a flight with the statuette, declaring it could be used as a weapon.
Talankin, the co-director and protagonist of the Best Feature Documentary winner, tells Deadline he has flown a dozen or more times with the Oscar since earning the award in March, each time without incident. But when he showed up at a security checkpoint at JFK’s Terminal 1 on Wednesday, a TSA agent told him he couldn’t take the Oscar – which weighs 8.5 lbs. – on board.
“It’s completely baffling how they consider an Oscar a weapon,” Talankin told us from Frankfurt, Germany, where he arrived Thursday morning on a Lufthansa flight. On previous flights on various airlines, he said, “[I] flew with it in the cabin and there never
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