This year’s Academy Awards ceremony was a historically significant occasion, the first to take place after the downfall of Harvey Weinstein and the rise of the #MeToo movement. It was hardly a vintage year for Australia but hey, at least we got one run on the board. The Sydney-born editor Lee Smith was the sole Aussie winner, taking best editing for Dunkirk, the writer/director Christopher Nolan’s superb second world war drama about the evacuation of allied troops from the titular French city.

Another Australian, Paul Machliss, was in contention for best editing, nominated for his work on the writer/director Edgar Wright’s offbeat crime caper Baby Driver. Smith and Machliss exhibited very different styles. The former juggled multiple timelines and vantage points with scalpel-like precision in Nolan’s gritty and visceral film, while the latter took a flashier approach for Wright’s visually batty style.

In his acceptance speech, Smith described Nolan as “an editor himself, [but] he doesn’t handle the actual equipment, and I am very, very happy for that”. Smith is a longtime Nolan collaborator, whose first feature film as editor was the 1986 Ozploitation oddity Dead End Drive-In. He continues a proud tradition among Australian editors, who tend to do well at the Oscars, collectively amassing a whopping 16 nominations over the past 25 years.

The most famous Australian nominated this year – and clearly the best dressed – was Margot Robbie. The actor turned up in a white Chanel gown, a custom haute couture piece to mark the announcement that she has just become that fashion house’s new brand ambassador. The Queensland-born former Neighbours star was nominated for best actress for her dazzling, high-voltage performance as the disgraced figure skater Tonya Harding in I, Tonya. Robbie lost to odds-on favourite Frances McDormand, who is easily the best thing about Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri, the writer/director Martin McDonagh’s overrated and racially problematic revenge drama.

The big surprise this year, in terms of Australian nominations, was the nod to the director Derin Seale and the actor-writer Josh Lawson for their short film, The Eleven O’Clock (for best live-action short). Seale is the son of the veteran cinematographer John Seale, who won an Oscar for 1997’s The English Patient and has been nominated a bunch of other times, the latest time for Mad Max: Fury Road.

An Oscar nomination was a particularly welcome stroke of good fortune for Lawson, in the wake of last year’s embarrassingly inept Channel Seven miniseries Hoges, which horribly miscast the actor as the veteran comedian Paul Hogan. The Eleven O’Clock was adapted from a short play written by Lawson, who stars in it alongside Damon Herriman (just on Australian screens as the protagonist in the Mardi Gras telemovie Riot). The film is now available to watch on ABC iView.

Had The Eleven O’Clock won, the Seales would have become the first Australian father and son to have received Academy Awards. Alas, it was not meant to be. Seale and Lawson lost to The Silent Child, a British film about a profoundly deaf child.

This year might not have been a great one for Australians at the Oscars, but we’ve had a good run. In 2017 the country chalked up a record 14 nominations, with two local films contending for best picture for the first time: the touching drama Lion, and brutal war pic Hacksaw Ridge. At the previous ceremony, in 2016, the director George Miller’s explode-a-palooza, Mad Max: Fury Road, took six golden statues back to the Wasteland – double the number of Oscars of the previous, record-holding Australian movie.