We had one film release this past weekend with the potential for Oscar nominations.

Three Thousand Years of Longing

George Miller’s tenth full length feature film is the first since his mega-Oscar winning Mad Max: Fury Road seven years ago. Looking back over his filmmaking career will tell us a lot of what we’ll need to know about the chances of this film at this year’s Oscars. His first three films were all about Mad Max as played by Mel Gibson. None of them were major Oscar players, though Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome likely came closest of the three with an original song from Tina Turner plus those killer costumes and sets. Were the Academy of today voting then, it might have pulled in two or three nominations. His fourth film drew major stars Jack Nicholson, Cher, Susan Sarandon, and Michelle Pfeiffer into a film about three women who who engage in witchcraft. The Witches of Eastwick netted two nominations for Original Score and Sound losing both.

His fifth film was equally successful, but in two far more noteworthy categories. Lorenzo’s Oil starred Sarandon again opposite Nick Nolte and Peter Ustinov. Sarandon was nominated in Best Actress while Miller and Nick Enright were nominated for Original Screenplay. Once again, the film went home with nothing. After the massive success of Babe, which Miller co-penned, but didn’t direct, he took aim at a sequel called Babe: Pig in the City. While the prior film scored several nominations, including one for Best Picture, Miller’s sequel only managed a single nomination for Original Song. Miller earned his only personal Oscar with his first foray into animation, Happy Feet. The film was a box office success and became one of the few non-Disney/Pixar films to capture the Animated Feature prize, its only nomination. His subsequent film was a sequel to that titled simply Happy Feet Two. It wasn’t nearly the success either at the box office or with critics and received no Oscar attention.

That leaves us with his 2015 major Oscar success Mad Max: Fury Road. Starring Tom Hardy in Gibson’s role and Charlize Theron in an original one, the film was a solid box office performer, bringing in $135 million, but it was the film’s Oscar haul that set it apart. Ten Oscar nominations in total, far and away his biggest tally to date, including Best Picture and Best Directing. It won six prizes, winning all but two of the eight craft categories in which it was nominated. That could be a clue to how well Three Thousand Years of Longing might have played had it been better liked by critics. A 71% at Rotten Tomatoes is decent, but 60 at MetaCritic isn’t good. With only a B rating from opening night audiences, the film isn’t going to be able to build buzz to the Oscars, which means its best chances are in the craft categories where Production Design, Costume Design, Makeup & Hairstyling, Sound, and Visual Effects are all possibilities, though I suspect it might only appear in the latter three of those.