Candidates from Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and Nicaragua were among the nominees for the 87th Academy Awards, which were unveiled this morning in Los Angeles. For the second time in a row, a Mexican filmmaker was nominated for Best Director: Alejandro González Iñárritu (pictured left) follows in the footsteps of Alfonso Cuarón who last year was nominated -and won- for his film Gravity.
In total González Iñárritu was nominated for three Oscars for his feature film Birdman or (the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance: as a producer for Best Motion Picture, and for Best Screenplay, along with Argentinean screenwriters Nicolás Giacobone and Armando Bo, and American screenwriter Alex Dinelaris.
Mexican DP Emmanuel Lubezki got his seventh nomination for Best Cinematography for his work on Birdman. He won his first Oscar last year for Cuarón’s Gravity. Birdman was the most honored film -along with Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, with nine Oscar nominations each.
Argentina earned its seventh nomination for Best Foreign Language Film with Damián Szifron’s Wild Tales / Relatos salvajes (pictured right). The South American country has won twice the Oscar in this category, the last time was in 2009 with Juan José Campanella’s El secreto de sus ojos / The Secret in Their Eyes.
In the Best Documentary, Brazilian director Juliano Salgado Ribeiro was nominated for his film The Salt of the Earth (co-directed by Wim Wenders), which is about his father, the renowned photographer Sebastião Salgado.
Last, but not least, the Mexican film La parka / The Reaper by Nicaraguan director Gabriel Serra Argüello was nominated for Best Documentary Short Subject. Selected among 58 entries the film was produced by the Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica (CCC) film school. Even though Nicaragua had received an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film in 1983 for Alsino y el cóndor / Alsino and the Condor, this marks the first time ever a Nicaraguan filmmaker gets an Oscar nomination, as the former was directed by Chilean filmmaker Miguel Littín.
The 87th edition of the Academy Awards will take place on February 22 in Los Angeles, California.
