With his two nods for The Theory of Everything he becomes only the third New Zealander - after Jackson and Fran Walsh in their producer roles - to have their name attached to a Best Picture nomination. He's one of four producers on the movie about the early life of Stephen Hawking.
As a nominee for best adapted screenplay, he's the sixth Kiwi to be nominated for a screenwriting Oscar.
His predecessors again include Jackson and Walsh for their early Heavenly Creatures and with writing partner Philippa Boyens for two The Lord of the Rings films, as well as Jane Campion who won an Oscar for her original script on The Piano.
Anthony McCarten has been nominated for the screenplay of The Theory of Everything.
So can McCarten win?
Well, in this year's best picture race the odds-on favourite is Boyhood, a movie with possibly the least remarkable lead character arc in Oscar history: Kid grows up and ...
In the best adapted screenplay category, McCarten might win votes for being the guy who got Jane Hawking to agree to let her autobiography Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen become a movie about her marriage to the astrophysicist.
The category is shaping up as a battle of the British boffins - the Hawking story versus that of code-breaker Alan Turing in The Imitation Game. Possibly counting against Imitation - if Oscar voters care about such things - are questions about its historical accuracy and how its characterisation of Turing on screen is different from the man profiled in the source material, Andrew Hodges' Alan Turing: The Enigma.
The category also includes Whiplash, the acclaimed jazz school movie which is also a best picture nominee. It had its script deemed "adapted" by the Academy because its director-writer Damien Chazelle made a prototype short film of the same name first.
Outsiders in the category include American Sniper - an unlikely winner because of the mediocre movie that has resulted from it - and Inherent Vice, Paul Thomas Anderson's brave, possibly foolhardy attempt to adapt Thomas Pynchon to the screen.
So McCarten is in with a good chance - though award season attention on the film so far has largely focused on Eddie Redmayne's portrayal of Hawking, which has won comparisons to Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot.
Notably, while The Theory of Everything appears in the nine-strong best picture category, the film's director, James Marsh, didn't make the cut among the five nominees for best director.
Whatever happens, the film has already put the Kiwi's career into higher orbit. It isn't his first movie. He's written and directed two of his own scripts in NZ - 1998's Via Satellite and 2008's Show of Hands - neither of which set the local box office alight.
Until Theory, it was looking the closest McCarten might get to the Academy Awards was for a movie he claimed he created without knowing it at the time.
He and Stephen Sinclair, the co-writer of their 1987 international hit stage play Ladies Night (and a '92 sequel), sued those behind Brit hit male stripper film The Full Monty - backed by Rupert Murdoch-owned 20th Century Fox - just as the film vied for a best picture Oscar in 1998. The case was settled out of court. McCarten's next project is an adaptation of Nick Davies' Hack Attack: How the Truth Caught Up with Rupert Murdoch. It's to be directed by George Clooney.
The big Oscar categories
Best picture
American Sniper
Birdman
Boyhood
The Grand Budapest Hotel
The Imitation Game
Selma
The Theory of Everything
Whiplash
Actor
Steve Carell, Foxcatcher
Bradley Cooper, American Sniper
Benedict Cumberbatch, The Imitation Game
Michael Keaton Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
Eddie Redmayne, The Theory of Everything
Actress
Marion Cotillard,Two Days, One Night
Felicity Jones, The Theory of Everything
Julianne Moore, Still Alice
Rosamund Pike, Gone Girl
Reese Witherspoon, Wild
Supporting actor
Robert Duvall, The Judge
Ethan Hawke, Boyhood
Edward Norton, Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
Mark Ruffalo, Foxcatcher
J.K. Simmons, Whiplash
Supporting actress
Patricia Arquette, Boyhood
Laura Dern, Wild
Keira Knightley, The Imitation Game
Emma Stone, Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
Meryl Streep, Into the Woods
Directing
Alejandro G. Inarritu, Birdman
Richard Linklater, Boyhood
Bennett Miller, Foxcatcher
Wes Anderson, The Grand Budapest Hotel
Morten Tyldum, The Imitation Game
Adapted screenplay
Jason Hall, American Sniper
Graham Moore, The Imitation Game
Paul Thomas Anderson, Inherent Vice
Anthony McCarten, The Theory of Everything
Damien Chazelle, Whiplash
For the full Oscar list see http://tinyurl.com/bol2gz
