Orgullo Puro: Here Are All the Latinos Nominated for Oscars This Year

2022’s Oscar nominations are officially out, and let’s just say we’re feeling tons of orgullo at the Latinos nominated across the board.

Sure, we haven’t stopped singing the entire “Encanto” soundtrack since last year (“We Don’t Talk About Bruno” is our jam — even the club remix), and we jumped with excitement the minute we heard about Guillermo del Toro’s latest creation “Nightmare Alley” — but the latest Oscar nods make us feel even prouder.

Several Latinos received Oscar nods this year, and with good reason: their work is absolutely epic. Here’s everything you need to know.

Guillermo del Toro’s “Nightmare Alley” is a thriller based on a 1946 novel that follows a carnival worker who performs a psychic act, but who soon gets entangled with a psychologist. Guadalajara, Mexico-born Del Toro directed the film and co-wrote the screenplay, getting inspired by the original book and the 1947 movie.

2021’s “Nightmare Alley” received four nominations, including Best Picture, Best Costume Design, Best Cinematography, and Best Production Design.

We love to see it, especially coming after Del Toro winning Best Picture and Best Director back in 2018 for the memorable, dreamy “The Shape of Water.” 

As expected, “Encanto” also received several Oscar nods this year — and we’re over here dancing vallenato and cumbia just thinking about it.

The movie was nominated for Best Original Score, headlined by the fierce composer Germaine Franco, who has spoken about getting inspired by her Mexican heritage and her love of Latin American magical realism writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

She set out to make the film “sound like this idea of magical realism in literature,” taking a deep-dive into thorough research of traditional Colombian instrumentation like the bandola and the arpa llanera. 

Meanwhile, “Encanto” was also nominated for Best Original Song for “Dos Oruguitas,” with both music and lyrics written by Lin-Manuel Miranda who is of Puerto Rican heritage.

Sung by Colombian star Sebastián Yatra, Miranda has said the folk song-inspired track challenged him the most, writing it in Spanish from the get-go. “Encanto” was also nominated for Best Animated Feature. 

Ariana DeBose received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her role as Anita in “West Side Story,” originally played by Rita Moreno. DeBose is half Puerto Rican and identifies as queer, telling Gay Times, “I choose to be open and I don’t accept anyone else’s truth about me,” while explaining “history books [are]… not written by women, they’re not written by people of colour… that’s why it’s great to celebrate all ethnicities.”

The film “West Side Story” tells the tale of two teen gangs in New York City, one of them being Puerto Rican, and was nominated for a whopping seven awards. It received nods for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actress, Best Costume Design, Best Sound, Best Cinematography, and Best Production Design.

Other Latino-headlined films received nominations, too: for one, “Bestia” is nominated for Best Animated Short, directed by Chilean filmmaker Hugo Covarrubias, produced by Chilean Tevo Díaz, and co-written by Covarrubias and Martín Erazo, who is also from Chile.

The 15-minute short film has been making waves since its release in 2021, following a secret police agent in Chile’s military dictatorship. As Covarrubias explained to Rotoscopers, it was inspired by the real-life “torturing agent” Ingrid Olderock, analyzing her “sinister mind” in order to depict “a totalitarian and ultra patriarchal system that ends up driving its officials crazy.”

“Please Hold” was also nominated for an Oscar, receiving a nod for Best Live Action Short.

The film looks into the future, portraying a young man named Mateo who is arrested by mistake, falling victim to a completely-automated jail system by way of a police drone. He must fight through the artificial intelligence-driven jail, looking for an actual person to help, making a thought-provoking comment on today’s justice system.

It was directed and co-written by K.D. Dávila, who is Mexican-American.