The 91st Academy Awards have a foreign flavour with The Favourite and Roma each having 10 nominations. Unfortunately, Canada isn't a strong part of those foreign ingredients.
Canada does have a pair of nominees in the best animated short category: Animal Behaviour from Vancouver-based Alison Snowden and David Fine via the National Film Board as well as Toronto-raised Domee Shi for Pixar's Bao. The other nominees in this category are Late Afternoon; One Small Step; and Weekends.
Montréal is the unifier for a pair of nominees in the live action short film category with Jeremy Comte for Fauve and Marianne Farley for Marguerite. The other nominees in this category are Detainment; Mother; and Skin.
Sound mixer Paul Massey is up for Bohemian Rhapsody and set decorator Gordon Sim is nominated for Mary Poppins Returns.
Toronto's Charlie Tyrell was a finalist for best documentary short with My Dead Dad’s Porno Tapes but did not make the cut.
Canadians Oscars nomination scoreboard
The Best Actor category could have had a pair of Canadians in the mix. Ryan Gosling could have had his third nomination in that category for First Man. Stephan James received a Golden Globe nomination for the TV show Homecoming but could have easily picked up a Oscars nomination for If Beale Street Could Talk.
Getting buzz is not as good as getting a nomination, but that buzz will certainly help James in what else a relatively young career.
The nominees in this category ended up being Christian Bale (Vice); Bradley Cooper (A Star Is Born); Willem Dafoe (At Eternity’s Gate); Rami Malek (Bohemian Rhapsody); and Viggo Mortensen (Green Book).
Chien de Garde fails to make Oscars shortlist
The list of 9 films was reduced to 5 this morning for the Best Foreign Language Film category:
Never Look Away (Germany)
Shoplifters (Japan)
Capernaum (Lebanon)
Roma (Mexico)
Cold War (Poland)
Birds Of Passage (Colombia); The Guilty (Denmark); Ayka (Kazakhstan); and Burning (South Korea) got bad news earlier this morning.
Roma, which does mention Quebec in its film, is a rare foreign film that is also up for Best Picture. Amour (2012) in French from Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke, is the only other film in the 21st century to reach that mark.
Yorgos Lanthimos, who is nominated for Best Director in this year's ceremony for The Favourite, got his first big break in the Best Foreign Language Film category for Dogtooth (Greece). In the 2011 ceremony, Dogtooth was also up against Incendies (Canada) from Denis Villeneuve. Those films lost out to In a Better World (Denmark) from Susanne Bier.
You also might know Lanthimos from The Lobster, which also features Rachel Weisz, nominated for The Favourite for Best Supporting Actress.
CanadianCrossing.com film coverage
The 2019 version of the Academy Awards will be without a host for the first time since 1989. Hard to imagine the Academy had a list of one, and that one was Kevin Hart.
The 91st Academy Awards will be on February 24 on ABC and CTV.
photos credit: If Beale Street Could Talk; First Man
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