By Jackie Shannon
The nominations for The 6th AACTA Awards are in, and Mel Gibson has come up trumps. The controversial actor/director has notched up a whopping thirteen nominations for his powerful WW2 drama, Hacksaw Ridge – which tells of a true life American war hero – making it the dominant player in Australia’s answer to the Oscars. A total of 12 feature films are nominated, across all awards, with five films competing for the Best Film gong: The Daughter, Girl Asleep, Goldstone, Tanna, and the aforementioned Hacksaw Ridge.
In the thesping categories, UK actor, Andrew Garfield, has been nominated for Best Lead Actor for his portrayal as real life war hero, Desmond Doss, in Hacksaw Ridge. He will go up against Australian actors, Ewen Leslie (The Daughter), John Brumpton (Pawno) and Damian Hill (Pawno). Fighting it out for the Best Actress Award will be Odessa Young (The Daughter), Maggie Naouri (Joe Cinque’s Consolation), Maeve Dermody (Pawno), and Teresa Palmer (Hacksaw Ridge). The Best Director category will be contested by Gibbo (Hacksaw Ridge), Ivan Sen (Goldstone), Rosemary Myers (Girl Asleep), and Bentley Dean & Martin Butler (Tanna), with the strangely restrictive four-nominations-only process meaning that debutante, Simon Stone, will have to be happy with The Daughter’s Best Film nomination.
And, of course, when any list of nominations comes out, the first thing that you start thinking about is the films that missed out, so at this point, FilmInk would like to acknowledge the cracking Aussie shows that will have zero to minimum presence at The 6th AACTA Awards: Down Under (Abe Forsythe did jag a nod for Best Original Screenplay), Boys In The Trees, Early Winter, Downriver, Broke…the list goes on.
For a full list of nominations, head to AACTA’s official website.
