Italy pins Oscar hopes on Canonero

(ANSA) - Los Angeles, January 15 - Italy was pinning its hopes on three-time Academy Award-winning Italian costume designer Milena Canonero on Thursday after she received her ninth Oscar nomination for the costumes for Wes Anderson's comedy film Grand Budapest Hotel. The 69-year-old Turin-born Canonero is the only representative of Italy at the 87th Academy Awards ceremony on February 22 after director Paolo Virzi failed to make the nine-movie shortlist for best foreign film with his David di Donatello-winning Il Capitale Umano (The Human Capital) in December. She will be competing against Mark Bridges for the costumes for Inherent Vice, Colleen Atwood for Into the Woods, Anna B.
    Sheppard and Jane Clive for Maleficent and Jacqueline Durran for Mr. Turner.
    Canonero won her first Oscar in 1976 for her costumes in Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon and her second in 1982 for her work on Hugh Hudson's Chariots of Fire, which also bagged the Oscar for best film.
    Her third Academy Award dates to 2007 for her costumes in Sophia Coppola's lavish period film Marie Antoniette.
    Canonero made her cinema debut with Kubrick in his 1971 A Clockwork Orange, in which she rejected the space-age costumes in Anthony Burgess' source novel in favour of a British faux-middle-class yob look complete with bowler hats and walking sticks.
    She returned to work with Kubrick on Barry Lyndon and for a third time on his 1980 thriller The Shining starring Jack Nicholson.
    Canonero has received five other Oscar nominations for her work on the films Out of Africa (1986), Tucker, the Man and His Dream (1989), Dick Tracy (1991), Titus (2000) and The Affair of the Necklace (2002).
    Grand Budapest Hotel stars Ralph Fiennes as a concierge who teams up with one of his employees (Tony Revolori) to prove his innocence after he is framed for murder.
    It has received a total of nine Academy Award nominations including best film - together with Clint Eastwood's American Sniper, Alejandro G. Iñárritu's Birdman, Richard Linklater's Boyhood, Morten Tyldum's The Imitation Game, Christian Colson's Selma, Tim Bevan's The Theory of Everything and Jason Blum's Whiplash - best director and best original screenplay.
    Birdman had also received nine nominations, while The Imitation Game followed with eight. Last year Italian director Paolo Sorrentino's The Great Beauty brought home the Academy Award for best foreign film, its eleventh in history and most ever for any country in the category.