On March 15, the 98th Academy Awards will be taking place at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, and as ever, Irish talent is right there in the mix.
Killarney actress Jessie Buckley has a strong chance of being the first Irishwomen to take home the famous golden statue for her role in Hamnet, a fictional story about the inspiration for Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
The movie got seven other nominations too, including for Maggie O’Farrell from Coleraine, who adapted her 2020 historical fiction novel alongside the director, Chloé Zhao: that win would be another Irish first in that category.
In the technical categories, Dubliner Richard Baneham is among the team nominees for Visual Effects for his work on Avatar: Fire and Ash. He’s won already for Avatar and Avatar: The Way of Water. Finally, in the Animated Short Film category,Retirement directed by Dublin-based filmmaker John Kelly and voiced by Domhnall Gleeson is in the race.
That famous statue has a Celtic connection too: it was designed by an Irishman named Cedric Gibbons. In 1927 he was dining alongside luminaries such as Louis B. Mayer, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford at the Biltmore Hotel, where the great and the good had met to discuss the idea behind the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS).
Naturally they were going to have an annual ceremony, and so they needed a design for their “Award of Merit” trophy. Over coffee and cigars, Gibbons sketched the now-legendary figure of a knight gripping a sword and standing in front of a reel of film.
That’s how the legend goes anyway, as does the legend that despite Gibbons saying he was born in Ireland, while the official records show he was in fact born in Brooklyn, New York. A slight Hollywood fairytale for effect perhaps, though his grandparents were definitely Irish, and his father Patrick was a first-generation immigrant.
An art director and designer for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer for 32 years, Gibbons designed over 2,000 films and was himself a winner of no less than 11 Oscars, including for Pride and Prejudice, Gaslight, The Yearling, Little Women, An American in Paris, and The Bad and the Beautiful.
He had many more nominations too, but for now take a stroll down memory lane as we list a few of the historical Irish highlights:
You’ll know or have seen My Left Foot, In the Name of the Father, Belfast and The Banshees of Inisherin, all of them Best Picture nominees (My Left Foot the first in 1989), though none of them – nor the other handful of nominees – have taken that major prize home.
Movies from the mind of Martin McDonagh have been nominated many times (Banshees, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, and In Bruges have all seen his name in the envelope), but he’s only won for Six Shooter, which won the Best Live Action Short in 2006).
No director has taken home the Oscar – not McDonagh, Kenneth Branagh (for Belfast), Jim Sheridan (My Left Foot), or Neil Jordan (The Crying Game) – and that includes Dublin-born director Herbert Brenon, who was nominated for Sorrell and Son at the very first Oscars back in 1928.
In acting, the unmatched three wins of Daniel Day-Lewis are particularly memorable (My Left Foot, There Will Be Blood and Lincoln), though of course Corkman Cillian Murphy won last year for Oppenheimer. The list of unsuccessful nominees is like an Irish who’s who of acting: Richard Harris (twice), Colin Farrell, Ballymena’s Liam Neeson, Michael Fassbender, Paul Mescal, and Belfast natives Stephen Rea and Branagh.
Way back in 1944, Barry Fitzgerland, a Dubliner, was nominated in two categories (Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor) for the same movie, Bing Crosby musical comedy drama Going My Way. It’s a record that has never been matched, though he won only the Supporting Actor gong.
Actress Saoirse Ronan (three times) and Ruth Negga – the first Black Irish actress – have not won yet as Best Actress either, though many people remember the solo Irish success as Supporting Actress: Brenda Fricker for her unforgettable performance in My Left Foot. Ronan had another unsuccessful nomination in this category too for Atonement (2007).
Supporting Actor nominations list Branagh (for My Week with Marilyn), Fassbender (12 Years a Slave), Belfast-born Ciaran Hinds (for Belfast) and two nods for The Banshees of Inisherin(Barry Keoghan and Brenda Gleeson. Neither won, nor did Kerry Condon as Supporting Actress for the same movie).
Branagh did take home the statue for his love letter to his home town, Belfast, in 2021, and he holds the record for being nominated in the most Oscar categories (Live Action Short Film, Director, Actor, Supporting Actor, Adapted Screenplay, Director, Best Picture).
The only other Best Original Screenplay winner was County Sligo’s Neil Jordan in 1992 for The Crying Game. Jim Sheridan (In America) and Belfast’s Terry George (Hotel Rwanda) had no luck, nor McDonagh.
Only one Adapted Screenplay win has gone back to Ireland, and that was way back in 1938, awarded to – believe it or not – George Bernand Shaw (shared with several others) for Pygmalion. The last Irish nomination in this category was unsuccessful, but it went to the first Irish woman nominated for such – Emma Donoghue for Room in 2015.
Despite never winning the Oscar itself, Irish animation movies have been especially successful in the last decade: The Secret of Kells (2009), Song of the Sea (2014) and Wolfwalkers (2021) all created a stir – and all were from the mind of Tomm Moore of Cartoon Saloon in Kilkenny.
In 2017 Nora Twomey was nominated in this category for Breadwinner, while 2022 saw the sole nomination for Best International Feature Film: The Quiet Girl (An Cailin Ciuin), directed by Colm Bairead, which was notable for being in the Irish language.
There have been several wins for Irish movies in the Best Live Action Short (you certainly might remember An Irish Goodbyefrom 2022, though I was sure that 1997s Dance Lexie Dance had won on the night – but it hadn’t). Another memorable win is from 2007, when Glen Hansard’s song Falling Slowly from Once took home the Best Original Song award.
Strangely, many performances and movies that we would now consider classics didn’t win the big prize, but that just proves that Ireland has always punched well above its weight at the Oscars. That’s likely to continue, but for this year we wish good luck to Jessie, Maggie, Richard and John.
By James Bartlett
