Here are all the Canadian Oscar nominees to cheer for at the Academy Awards

Actor Ryan Gosling, director Celine Song, late musician Robbie Robertson and more are up for awards Sunday

Kevin Maimann · CBC News ·

The 96th Academy Awards are coming up this weekend, and there is no shortage of Canadian nominees.

One of the country’s biggest stars, Ryan Gosling, will be front and centre at Sunday’s ceremony with a highly anticipated performance of the power ballad I’m Just Ken — in the running for best original song — from the blockbuster Barbie.

Here are some of the Canadians who will be competing for Hollywood’s top prizes Sunday.

Ryan Gosling

Best supporting actor, Barbie

Barbie was 2023’s top grossing film, raking in nearly $1.5 billion U.S. and notching eight Academy Award nominations, including one for best picture.

Hailing from London, Ont., Gosling is known for starring in films including Drive, The Notebook and Blade Runner 2049. Not everyone was happy to see him get the Oscars nod this year, however, with some Barbie fans arguing that lead actress Margot Robbie and director Greta Gerwig were unfairly snubbed. Gosling said he was “disappointed” by their exclusion but still honoured to be nominated.

WATCH | The trailer for Barbie: 

Celine Song

Best original screenplay, Past Lives

Celine Song, Korean-Canadian director, pictured during an interview with CBC’s Jackson Weaver at the Glenn Gould Studio in Toronto, on May 29, 2023. (Nav Rahi/CBC)

The acclaimed playwright, who moved from South Korea to Markham, Ont., at age 12, has seen a meteoric rise to success in her move to film, earning an Oscar nod for her feature directorial debut Past Lives. 

Written and directed by Song, the film tells the story of a Korean woman who emigrated to Canada as a child and has her childhood sweetheart from Seoul show up in New York, where she lives with her American husband. Song says Past Lives, which garnered rave reviews at last summer’s Sundance Festival, is a semi-autobiographical tale.

WATCH | The trailer for Past Lives: 

Nisha Pahuja

Best documentary feature film, To Kill a Tiger

Nisha Pahuja poses for a portrait during the 96th Academy Awards Oscar nominees luncheon on Feb. 12 at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills, Calif. (Chris Pizzello/Invision/The Associated Press)

The Toronto-based director spent eight years working on this documentary that follows Ranjit, a man from Jharkhand, India, as he seeks justice for his teenage daughter, who was brutally sexually assaulted in an event that fiercely divided their village.

Pahuja, whose 2012 documentary The World Before Her won numerous Canadian film festival awards, raised hundreds of thousands of dollars and drummed up several star endorsements to fund To Kill a Tiger‘s distribution, and the film is scheduled to hit Netflix Friday.

“It’s been a long, long road. And Netflix was the icing on the cake,” Pahuja said to CBC’s Eli Glasner Thursday after arriving in Los Angeles for this weekend’s festivities. “It was unexpected.” Canadian producers Cornelia Principe and David Oppenheim are also nominated alongside Pahuja.

WATCH | The trailer for To Kill a Tiger: 

Robbie Robertson

Best original score, Killers of the Flower Moon

Robbie Robertson received Canadian Music Week’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2019. (Paul Borkwood/CBC)

Martin Scorsese dedicated the epic western drama Killers of the Flower Moon to Robertson, a legendary Toronto musician who completed the film’s score shortly before his death in August at age 80, marking the end of a storied career.

Robertson played guitar and sang in The Band in the 1970s and also slung the axe in Bob Dylan’s band for several years, as well as scoring numerous films dating back to 1980. Killers of the Flower Moon, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Lily Gladstone and Robert DeNiro, has received a whopping 10 Oscar nominations.

WATCH | The trailer for Killers of the Flower Moon: 

Vincent René-Lortie

Best live action short, Invincible

Filmmaker Vincent Rene-Lortie, director of the Oscar-nominated short film Invincible, speaks to media during a press conference on Jan. 23 in Montreal. (Ryan Remiorz/The Canadian Press)

The Montreal director, nominated alongside producer Samuel Caron, said it was the “craziest morning” of his life when he learned Invincible had been nominated in the live-action short film category. Not bad for the first release from his production company, Telescope Films.

The 30-minute film was inspired by the true story of René-Lortie’s childhood friend, who died at age 14, and follows a teenage boy who was incarcerated in a youth detention centre and will go to great lengths to avoid having to go back after a weekend out on furlough.

“Everything has been a total surprise for us since we’ve been nominated,” René-Lortie told CBC News on Thursday. “The word that we keep repeating is surreal, because it’s our first film together so it is quite surreal what we’re living right now.”

WATCH | The trailer for Invincible:

Ben Proudfoot

Best documentary short film, The Last Repair Shop

Filmmaker Ben Proudfoot accepts the documentary short subject award for The Queen of Basketball on stage during the 94th Annual Academy Awards at the Dolby Theatre in 2022. (Neilson Barnard/Getty Images)

Proudfoot, originally from Halifax, co-directed The Last Repair Shop with L.A.’s Kris Bowers to tell the story of kids whose lives have been changed by the L.A. Unified School District Musical Instrument Repair Shop, where technicians service thousands of instruments each year free of charge for more than 1,300 schools across the city.

Proudfoot previously won an Oscar in 2022 for his short documentary The Queen of Basketball, and said the thrill of an Oscar nomination never diminishes. “It’s always exciting. New new film, new story, new group of people you get to spend time with and go through this exciting process with,” Proudfoot said Thursday. “So it’s been an amazing thrill, just as always.

WATCH | The trailer for The Last Repair Shop: 

Troy Quane 

Best animated feature film, Nimona

An adaptation of the sci-fi graphic novel of the same name, Nimona was almost crushed before its release. Initially produced by Blue Sky studios, Disney purchased the studio in 2021 and announced it was shutting down the studio and the film’s production.

Former staff members later alleged Disney leadership pushed back on the film’s 2SLGBTQ+ themes. Quane and co-director Nick Bruno were brought on after Annapurna Pictures picked it up in 2022, making it the first release for the company’s new animation division.

“We went from this movie not existing, to standing shoulder to shoulder at the heights of what this industry has to celebrate,” Quane said Thursday, calling Nimona “the dark horse nomination.” Canadian co-producer Julie Zackary is also nominated alongside Quane.

WATCH | The trailer for Nimona: 

Jeff Sutherland and Stéphane Ceretti

Best visual effects, Mission Impossible and Guardians of the Galaxy 3

Sutherland, a three-time Oscar winner and grad of Ottawa’s Carleton University, is up for his work on the Tom Cruise blockbuster Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One, while Ceretti, who served as visual effects supervisor on major films like The Matrix sequels and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, is hoping for his first win for his work on Marvel flick Guardians of the Galaxy 3.

• 23 streamable (or free) Oscar-nominated films to watch in Canada

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kevin Maimann

Digital writer

Kevin Maimann is a senior writer for CBC News based in Edmonton. He has covered a wide range of topics for publications including VICE, Toronto Star, Xtra Magazine and the Edmonton Journal. You can reach Kevin by email at kevin.maimann@cbc.ca.

With files from Eli Glasner

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