What REALLY happens when you’re nominated for an Oscar?
Last year, Cleona Ní Chrualaoi’s An Cáilín Ciúin was on the Academy Award shortlist – and she found herself in the unchartered territory normally reserved for A-listers. Here she reveals...
The Oscars ceremony in 2023 drew a huge audience of 19.9 million viewers across linear and digital platforms. But what is it like to actually attend the Academy Awards? For most of us, the nearest we will get is the TV highlights but for a very lucky few, attending Hollywood’s starriest night becomes a reality they will never forget. For producer Cleona Ní Chrualaoí and her husband, director Colm Bairéad, who attended the 95th Academy Awards, with their film An Cailín Ciúin, memories of the event are still exhilarating.
Cleona can vividly recall the moment they learned their film had earned a place as one of the short-listed five final nominees for the Best International Feature Film. They were with cast and crew as well as representatives from Screen Ireland and TG4 in the Stella Cinema in Rathmines. ‘We were all gathered together in the cinema and the Academy was announcing the various nominations,’ she recalls. ‘It was around lunchtime here and we were all seated and then the
International Category was announced one by one. They announced four films and we were the fifth film to be nominated – “The Quiet Girl, An Cailín Ciúin” – and we all just jumped out of our seats and started screaming and hugging. We were just so joyful and went into celebration mode.
‘If we hadn’t got nominated it would have been quite the anticlimax, but we wanted to do a gathering anyway to, I suppose, celebrate everything that the film had achieved to date regardless of whether we got nominated that day or not,’ she explains.
‘At that stage, we had received two nominations for the BAFTAs as well, so there was lots to celebrate.
This was just the icing on the cake, I suppose. We were just in disbelief in some ways,’ she says, ‘but it wasn’t totally unexpected because we had been hearing what voters were thinking on the ground through our distributor and our publicist. We’d a feeling we were there or thereabouts but you couldn’t be sure.’
The moment is etched in Cleona’s heart. ‘It was amazing, I’ll never forget that feeling. I remember when they were announcing the awards, they say the country as well as the film and I didn’t even hear Ireland, we just heard The Quiet Girl and everybody just jumped up and it was just a brilliant feeling.’
For a small independent film in the Irish language to get an Oscars nomination was historic but both Cleona and Colm had a quiet confidence in their intimate drama. ‘We used to call it the little film that could,’ she says, ‘because it was such a small film in a way, but it gathered momentum and it just kept building and building throughout the year. It was kind of unstoppable.
‘In February, we had won the Foreign Language Film of the
‘WE USED TO CALL IT THE LITTLE FILM THAT COULD... IT WAS KIND OF UNSTOPPABLE’