Famed art director hoping for second win with Lo Schiavo - Oscar-winning Italian art director Dante Ferretti received his eighth Academy Award nomination on Tuesday - one of four nominations for Italy.
Ferretti, together with wife and long-time collaborator Francesca Lo Schiavo, was nominated for Best Art Direction/Set Decoration for Tim Burton's musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.
If he wins, it will be only his second Academy Award after Martin Scorsese's The Aviator - with Lo Schiavo - in 2005.
Two Italian film-music composers were also nominated Tuesday: this year's Golden-Globe winner Dario Marianelli for Atonement and Marco Beltrami for 3:10 To Yuma.
Director Andrea Jublin's short Il Supplente (The Substitute Teacher) - winner of this year's Aspen Shortsfest best comedy award - was Italy's fourth nominee. Director Giuseppe Tornatore, Best Foreign Film winner with Nuovo Cinema Paradiso in 1990, failed in his bid for a third foreign-film nomination with his latest work La Sconosciuta (The Unknown Woman). Tornatore was also nominated in 1996 for Uomo delle Stelle.
Apart from composer Marianelli, whose odds have shortened because of his Golden Globe for Atonement, Ferretti is probably Italy's best bet at this year's Oscar ceremony on February 24.
He will be up against Gladiator nominee Arthur Max for American Gangster, Pride and Prejudice nominee Sarah Greenwood for Atonement, three-time nominee Dennis Gassner (Bugsy, Barton Fink, Road to Perdition) for The Golden Compass and first-time nominee Jack Fisk for There Will Be Blood.
The 64-year-old from the northern Italian city of Macerata, who made his name working for Italian maestros Pier Paolo Pasolini and Federico Fellini, is a long-time collaborator of Scorsese.
As well as The Aviator, he was also nominated for the American director's Age of Innocence in 1994, Kundun in 1998 and Gangs of New York in 2003.
Ferretti's other nominations were for Terry Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen in 1990, Franco Zeffirelli's Hamlet in 1991 and Neil Jordan's Interview with the Vampire in 1995.
Ferretti styled five films for Pasolini and four for Fellini and acknowledges them as his ''two mentors''.
''Pasolini was more poetic; he created a kind of poetic reality,'' Ferretti said before the Aviator win. ''From Fellini I learned more about design. He always created his world from his dreams. Everything had to be a little bit big with him - never to scale; always a little bigger. He taught me to think big''.
