UPDATED: Alfonso Cuarón and Alexandre Desplat Among 2019 Oscar Nominees
It’s Oscar season once again! The nominees were announced early this morning, with two notable Harry Potter alumni up for awards.
Alfonso Cuarón’s new film, Roma, received ten nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress for Yalitza Aparicio, Best Supporting Actress for Marina de Tavira, Best Original Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Foreign-Language Film, Best Sound Mixing, Best Sound Editing, and Best Production Design. We remember Cuarón as the visionary director of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, but Hollywood knows him as one of its greatest indie film directors. Roma, which follows the life of a live-in housekeeper for a middle-class family in 1970s Mexico City, is a deeply personal film for the director. Cuarón’s care and attention to detail certainly paid off, and we wouldn’t be surprised if Roma took home several of these awards.
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Update (January 23):
Cuarón responded to his nomination in a phone call with ABC News.
Cinema needs the opportunity to be diverse. What mainstream cinema and the theatrical experience has lacked in general is diversity. And I’m talking about diversity in terms of stories and characters and ways of doing films.
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Veteran composer Alexandre Desplat also snagged his tenth Academy Award nomination for Best Original Score, this time for animated film Isle of Dogs (which itself is up for Best Animated Feature). Though Desplat never received a nomination for either part of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, his talent remains legendary, and this nomination is well deserved.
In other Potter news, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, starring Brendan Gleeson (Alastor “Mad-Eye” Moody), Ralph Ineson (Amycus Carrow), and Harry Melling (Dudley Dursley), has been nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Costume Design, and Best Original Song, and Mary Poppins Returns, featuring Noma Dumezweni (Harry Potter and the Cursed Child‘s original Hermione Granger) and Dame Julie Walters (Molly Weasley), was nominated for Best Costume Design, Best Original Song, Best Original Score, and Best Production Design. Rounding out the list is First Man, featuring Ciarán Hinds (Aberforth Dumbledore), which was nominated for Best Sound Mixing, Best Sound Editing, Best Production Design, and Best Visual Effects. Avengers: Infinity War, featuring a voice cameo from Sir Kenneth Branagh (Gilderoy Lockhart), Christopher Robin, featuring Toby Jones as the voice of Owl, and Solo: A Star Wars Story, featuring a cameo from Warwick Davis (Filius Flitwick), were also nominated for Best Visual Effects.
In Fantastic Beasts news, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, featuring the voice talent of Leta Lestrange actress Zoë Kravitz as Mary Jane Watson, was nominated for Best Animated Feature.
Congratulations to all the nominees! Check out the full list of nominees, and tune in to the 91st annual Academy Awards on February 24 to see Cuarón and Desplat hopefully accept their Oscars.
