Sensational news! A Hungarian among the Oscars 2024 winners

James Price (l), who won the Academy Award for Best Production Design with set designer Zsuzsa Mihalek, and British scenic designer Shona Heath (r) receive their awards at the 96th Academy Awards at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles on March 10, 2024. The three were recognised for their work in the making of Poor Thingss, a film based on the novel by Scottish author Alasdair Gray, directed by Jorge Lanthimos and shot in Hungary. Photo: MTI/EPA/Caroline Brehman

Hungary’s Zsuzsa Mihalek has won the 2024 Academy Award (Oscars) for Production Design.

Mihalek won the acknowledgement for set decoration, along with James Price and Shona Heath for production design, for their work on director Yorgos Lanthimos’s feature Poor Things.

Poor Things, filmed at Origo Studios in Budapest, won four Oscars at the awards ceremony in Hollywood on Sunday: in addition to the nod for production design, it won the Oscar for Best Actress, Best Costume Design and Best Makeup and Hairstyling.

As we wrote earlier, this year, Mihalek won the British Film Prize, the BAFTA, for her work on Poor Things, but was not in London to receive the award. She was not there in Los Angeles for the Oscars either. Price and Heath mentioned that they missed “Zsuzsi” not being there.

James Price, Shona Heath and Zsuzsa Mihalek accept the award for Best Production Design for “Poor Things.”#Oscars #Oscars2024 https://t.co/X7unxQW0XY pic.twitter.com/FIFe2ClMLy

— ABC News (@ABC) March 11, 2024

In eight years, Zsuzsa Mihalek is the fourth Hungarian filmmaker to be honoured by the US Film Academy. In 2016, László Nemes Jeles received the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film for Son of Saul, Kristóf Deák won the Best Live Action Short Film category for With Everyone in 2017, and Zsuzsanna Sipos received the Golden Statue for her work as the director of the first part of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune in 2022.

Zsuzsa Mihalek began her career as a set designer in the 1980s, working on films such as Csinibaba and Argo. She has also worked on several productions shot in Hungary and contributed to a number of films internationally.