Nominations set stage for Oscar sequel, starring Inarritu

Let’s look back at his road to the Academy Awards, including his previous nominations and who won that year.

Eight out of a possible ten films were nominated for best picture.

But absences were also stuck on repeat.

The acting nominees, which notably omitted Idris Elba for “Beasts of No Nation” and Benicio Del Toro for “Sicario” – both of whom were predicted by many handicappers – gave the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences an awkward repeat of the “OscarsSoWhite” backlash that followed last year’s acting nominees.

The Oscar winners will be announced on February 28 (February 29 Australian time) in a ceremony in Los Angeles hosted by Chris Rock.

A hitherto winless Leonardo DiCaprio has a good chance of taking home an Academy Award, with a best actor nod for The Revenant, his sixth nomination.

“Champagne and mezcal will run tonight!” said Inarritu in a statement from London. George Miller’s latest “Mad Max” installment, with 10 nominations including best picture and best director, appeared as the familiar commercial hit driven by an auteur’s vision-a slot filled in the past by “Gravity” and “Life of Pi”.

The Martian received seven nominations, including best picture and best actor for Matt Damon, but Ridley Scott was passed over for best director.

The Oscar nominees for best animated film have been announced in Beverly Hills, California.

The director of the critically-acclaimed “Straight Outta Compton“, a biopic about the rap group N.W.A, was also snubbed.

“Carol”, the film about a lesbian relationship in 1950s NY, picked up acting nods for stars Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara but didn’t receive nominations for picture or directing.

In front of and behind the camera, diversity remains a widely acknowledged problem for the movie industry, and few films starring and directed by minorities were seen as contenders. He’s now one of just a handful of performers who have been nominated twice for the same role, and the distance between his movies is far and away the longest. “You gotta do.’ Talking gets to the doing, and we are going to do”.

The best actress field is led by favorite Brie Larson for “Room”, along with Jennifer Lawrence (for “Joy”, making her, at 25, the youngest four-time nominee), Cate Blanchett (her seventh nod, for “Carol”), Saoirse Ronan (“Brooklyn”) and Charlotte Rampling (“45 Years”). Also nominated were Tom Hardy (“The Revenant”) and Christian Bale (“The Big Short”).

I’m particularly glad that one nomination is for the extraordinary Lenny Abrahamson for best director.

They will compete against Drew Goddard for his adaptation of Alex Weir’s novel The Martian, Phyllis Nagy for Carol, which is based on the Patricia Highsmith novel The Price Of Salt, and Charles Randolph and Adam McKay for The Big Short, which is based on Michael Lewis’s book of the same name.

The British Film Institute said that home-grown productions are up for 41 awards, around a third of all nominations.

– Steven Spielberg, whose “Bridge of Spies” was nominated for best picture on Thursday, has set the record for the most best picture nominations for an individual producer with nine.

Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight has three nominations (best supporting actress for Jennifer Jason Leigh, best original score for Ennio Morricone; best cinematography for Robert Richardson) but was overlooked for best picture and best director.