Will fifth time be the charm for Leonardo DiCaprio?

Davidlohr Bueso Who will take home the coveted statuettes this year? Mexican director Alejandro G. Iñárritu has been nominated for three of his last four movies (2010’s “Biutiful”, was nominated for foreign-language film) and won previous year for “Birdman”.

“The Revenant’s” Best Picture competition includes “The Martian”, “Bridge Of Spies”, “Brooklyn”, “The Big Short”, “Room”, “Spotlight” and “Mad Max: Fury Road”.

“The Martian”, which trailed the top two films with seven nominations, picked up a best-actor nomination for Matt Damon as an astronaut stranded alone on Mars. That means he has been nominated for the same character 39 years apart. 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.

The nominations were full of surprises.

– 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.

Apart from the best picture, best actor for DiCaprio and best director for Inarritu, the movie has bagged nominations for best supporting actor (Tom Hardy), best cinematography, sound editing, costume design, sound mixing, film editing, production design, visual effects and make up and styling.

He won the Golden Globe for Best Screenplay but the lack of nomination for Aaron Sorkin’s Steve Jobs goes to show that you can’t always predict the Oscar categories based on other award ceremonies.

In recent years, the academy has ramped up its efforts to diversify its membership, which numbers more than 6,000 and is overwhelmingly white and male.

Oscar nominees for Best Supporting Actress: (from left) Alicia Vikander, Rachel McAdams, Rooney Mara, Kate Winslet, Jennifer Jason Leigh.

The Calgary International Film Festival is now an Oscar-qualifying festival for short films.

For films still in theatres, like The Revenant, the nominations are an opportunity to pull in more fans in the weeks leading up to the late February Oscars telecast.

“To work with such a brilliant young director (Quentin Tarantino) at my age gives me great pleasure”.

With regards to the acting categories, there’s not much competition for the frontrunners.

“The Academy people don’t vote by race or gender, but it’s the studios that need to fix this by better reflecting the population”, Gray told AFP. Netflix had a solid chance of establishing itself as a major player with its narrative feature debut “Beasts of No Nation”, but the tale of a child soldier in West Africa was completely shut out of the Oscar noms — especially surprising for director Cary Fukunaga, and supporting star Idris Elba. What does director Todd Haynes have to do to get arrested in this town, anyway?

The Oscars have also faced criticism in recent years for focusing on art-house content over blockbusters.