Five minutes before the Big Performance, the Maestro is getting ready for the execution behind the curtains.

Time is slowly ticking away...

MAESTRO for the OSCAR®

After several international festival prizes Géza M. Tóth's film has been nominated for Best Animated Short Film's OSCAR®

Nominations for the 79th Annual Academy Awards were announced on Tuesday, January 23, by Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences President Sid Ganis and past Oscar® nominee Salma Hayek.

Ganis and Hayek, who was nominated for an Academy Award® in 2002 for her lead performance in “Frida,” announced the nominations in 10 of the 24 categories at a 5:30 a.m. live news conference at the Academy’s Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills. Nominations in all categories then were distributed to the over 400 international media representatives in attendance and via the Internet on the official Academy Awards Web site, www.oscar.com.

Academy members from the various branches selected the nominees in their corresponding award categories, with the exception of the Animated Feature and Foreign Language Film categories, in which nominations were determined by vote of screening committees composed of members from several branches. All voting members are eligible to select the Best Picture nominees. Ballots were mailed to 5,830 voting members in late December and were returned directly to PricewaterhouseCoopers, the international accounting firm, for tabulation.

Academy Awards for outstanding film achievements of 2006 will be presented on Sunday, February 25, 2007, at the Kodak Theatre at Hollywood & Highland Center®, and televised live by the ABC Television Network at 5 p.m. PST (8 p.m. EST), beginning with a half-hour arrivals segment, “The Road to the Oscars®.”

Best animated short film nominees are:

“The Danish Poet” (National Film Board of Canada)
A Mikrofilm and National Film Board of Canada Production
Torill Kove

“Lifted” (Buena Vista)
A Pixar Animation Studios Production
Gary Rydstrom

“The Little Matchgirl” (Buena Vista)
A Walt Disney Pictures Production
Roger Allers and Don Hahn 

“Maestro” (Szimplafilm)
A Kedd Production
Geza M. Toth

“No Time for Nuts” (20th Century Fox)
A Blue Sky Studios Production
Chris Renaud and Michael Thurmeier

Source: filmunio.hu