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Six movies that played at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival, and one playing this week at the 2017 festival, received Academy Award nominations Tuesday morning.
The big haul was for Kenneth Lonergan's grief drama "Manchester by the Sea," which premiered at the festival last year and immediately prompted a bidding war that saw Amazon Studios paying a reported $10 million.
"Manchester by the Sea" received six nominations — Best Picture, Original Screenplay and Directing (both for Lonergan) and three acting nods: Casey Affleck for lead actor, Lucas Hedges for supporting actor and Michelle Williams for supporting actress.
Viggo Mortensen's performance as the dad of an off-the-grid family in "Captain Fantastic," another Sundance premiere, also got a Best Actor nomination.
"The Lobster," director Yorgos Lanthimos' surreal romantic comedy-drama set in a world in which singlehood gets one turned into an animal, was nominated for Original Screenplay. Lanthimos shares that nomination with co-writer Efthimis Filippou.
Two documentaries that debuted at Sundance will vie in the Documentary Feature category: "Life, Animated," about a family coping with their adult son's autism; and "O.J.: Made in America," a seven-hour look at the issues of race and celebrity surrounding the O.J. Simpson murder case.
Another documentary received an unusual nod. "Jim: The James Foley Story," a profile of the journalist who was taken hostage and executed by the so-called Islamic State group, picked up a nomination in the Original Song category for "The Empty Chair." The song's writers, Sting and J. Ralph, performed the song at the Sundance ASCAP Music Cafe last year.
The one movie on Sundance's 2017 slate to get a nomination Tuesday is "My Life as a Zucchini." The French/Swiss production, a stop-motion tale of an orphan boy finding friends in a foster home, was nominated in the Animated Feature category. It's playing in the festival's Kids section and screens again Saturday at 12:30 at the Redstone Cinema 1 in Park City.