When nominations for the 93rd Academy Awards were announced Monday morning (March 15), there were few Latinos on the list.
According to most movie awards pundits, the best chance Latinos had to score a nomination in one of the four acting categories this year was with Colman Domingo for Best Supporting Actor in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Unfortunately, Domingo didn’t land one of the five nods.
Luckily, Latinos weren’t shut out completely this year. One even got a double nomination. Afro-Panamanian filmmaker Shaka King earned a Best Picture nod as a producer for the drama Judas and the Black Messiah, the biopic on Black Panther Party chairman Fred Hampton and FBI informant Bill O’Neal. King also received a Best Original Screenplay nomination for co-writing the same film.
In the Documentary Feature category, Chilean producer and director Maite Alberdi and Chilean producer Marcela Santibáñez were nominated for their work on The Mole Agent. The film follows a private investigator in Chile who hires a grandfather to infiltrate a retirement home as a spy and find out if there is any elder abuse occurring there.
“People are very moved and they tell us that after watching the movie, they called or visited their grandparents,” Alberdi recently told Remezcla. “The movie is rekindling these connections, which is what we had hoped for.”
Also landing their first Oscar nominations (Best Sound) are Mexican sound mixer Carlos Cortés and Mexican sound engineer Jaime Baksht for their work on the drama Sound of Metal. The film uses incredible sound design to tell the story of a heavy metal drummer who must come to terms with his rapid hearing loss.
The 93rd annual Academy Awards air live on ABC Sunday, April 25 at 8 p.m. EST.
