Nadine Labaki makes Oscars history!
Nadine Labaki is the first Lebanese female filmmaker to ever be nominated for an Oscar
Lebanese filmmaker Nadine Labaki has made history again today as the first female Arab filmmaker ever to be nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar for her moving refugee drama Capernaum. Egyptian director Jehane Noujaim was previously nominated in the Best Feature Documentary category for 2013's The Square.
Labaki entered the record books last May as the first Arab woman to pick up a major prize at Cannes when she won the Jury Prize following a premiere screening that earned a 15-minute-plus standing ovation. She did so again in December when she was the first to be shortlisted for the nomination, alongside another eight films from around the world.
Today, she moved onto the next level with the announcement that her film had made the final nomination list – the second successive year a Lebanese film made the cut following the nomination for Ziad Doueri’s The Insult at last year’s awards.
Can she now go one step further and win the award?
She certainly has some high profile supporters. None other than chat show queen, and Academy voting member, Oprah Winfrey, tweeted her support for the film on January 13 – the day before Oscars voting closed.
The film has also been nominated for a foreign language BAFTA, as well as a Golden Globe – where it lost out to Alfonso Cuaron’s hotly fancied Roma recently. That film could prove Labaki’s nemesis.
At the same time as Labaki was celebrating her own nomination, Cuaron was celebrating becoming only the 10th director to have a film not in the English language nominated in the Best Picture category, and the movie is among the favourites to pick up that award.
If it does, it would be the first foreign language film ever to do so. Simple logic would dictate that if Roma is among the best films in any language of the year, it is by default the best in a foreign language, since none of its Foreign Language competitors have been nominated for Best Picture. Voting doesn’t always follow a logical pattern, however – just look to either side of the Atlantic for evidence – and voters who give Cuaron the nod for Best Picture may well feel that they should give something else a chance in the Foreign section.