USC is well-represented in Academy Award nominations this year, continuing a tradition that includes at least 180 nominations and 71 wins of the gold statuette to date.

Robert Elswit ’75 is nominated for achievement in cinematography for There Will Be Blood. Jason Reitman ’99, the director of Juno, is one of five nominated for achievement in directing. John Knoll ’84, along with three colleagues, is nominated for achievement in visual effects for Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End.

Elswit and Knoll are alums of the USC School of Cinematic Arts. Reitman is a USC College grad who took courses at Cinematic Arts.

James Newton Howard DMA ’69 in piano performance, is nominated for best original score for Michael Clayton. This is the USC Thornton School of Music graduate’s seventh Oscar nomination. Another best original score nominee, Marco Beltrami ’93, studied in USC Thornton’s scoring for motion picture and television program. He was nominated for the film 3:10 to Yuma.

In addition, ’98 Cinematic Arts MFA production grad Adam Hyman was the co-producer of a nominated documentary, Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience. USC Annenberg alumna Talleah Bridges (M.A. broadcast journalism, ’02) and Megan (Parlen) Schwartzman (M.A. broadcast journalism, ’05) served as liaisons on that film.

Jack Lewis Jr., a ’94 Cinematic Arts writing MFA graduate who was deployed to Iraq with a detachment of the Army Reserves in mid-2004, wrote a story that is part of the film.

Operation Homecoming derives its source material from a collection of essays, e-mail messages, poems and letters from soldiers and their families.

The New York Times called one of those messages, Lewis’ moving and emotional Road Work, the book’s “most heartbreaking story.”

Road Work tells of an elderly Iraqi man and his son hit by an armored vehicle in a head-on collision with American soldiers.

“This whole experience has been evolving pretty rapidly and in some very unexpected directions,” said Lewis, who appears in the film in an on-camera interview. “When I wrote my e-mails, I just wanted to let everyone know that we were OK and things were going along.”