There's nothing like an Oscar nomination to shine a light on even the smallest of movies, and potentially create a hit.

Hugh Welchman, who co-wrote and co-directed "Loving Vincent," was delighted by the attention that an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Feature brought to his drama about the life of artist Vincent van Gogh.

"There's nothing bigger than the Oscars, so to be nominated for the Oscars in five films out of all the films that were released last year, is not only a great honor, it also has, financially, some benefits for us," says Welchman, who won an Academy Award for best animated short film for "Peter and the Wolf" in 2006.

In fact, "Loving Vincent" - the first fully painted animated feature film - has since become a hit.

"The film is a Polish-UK co-production, and in Poland, when they found out about the Oscar nomination, because it's the first time in history that a Polish film has been nominated in the animation-feature category, they just put the film straight back into the cinemas.  And we had 9,000 people go and see it on the day after the nomination, on a Wednesday, so yeah - that's great," he says.

Director Luca Guadagnino's film, "Call Me By Your Name," is up for Best Picture this year, and the Oscar nomination has caused an upturn in his fortunes in his home country.

"My last two movies before 'Call Me by Your Name': 'I Am Love' and 'A Big Splash,' they opened so badly in Italy that I always said to my financiers, to the people I was working with: 'Listen - Italy, it's not the market for me.  It's not a place where I have any kind of grip, truly - even if I'm an Italian filmmaker and the movies are made in Italy.  And this year, we opened in Italy two days after the Oscar nominations came out, and I'm enjoying an incredible success for the film.  And it's not, it's not irrelevant what these nominations made commercially for the film and in terms of its reputation.  It's been fantastic."

Writer-director Ruben Ostlund, who's nominated for Best Foreign Language Film for satirical drama "The Square," says the Oscars are taken very seriously in his home country, Sweden.

"It has a huge impact when it comes to attention.  And, for example, in Sweden, you know, Oscar is almost compared with the Nobel Prize when it comes to prestige.  So as soon as you get nominated, you get a lot of attention and of course, it will be easier to finance the next project.  It also depends on the character of the project, of course, but I would definitely say that it's like one of the brands in the world that is the strongest when it comes to changing the hierarchy. So, if someone suddenly picks up an Oscar, you are changing the hierarchy in a completely different way than any other, like, of these prizes."

Director Steve James is nominated for Best Documentary Feature for "Abacus: Small Enough to Jail," about a family-owned community bank in New York which became the only financial institution to face criminal charges following the subprime mortgage crisis.  He's not sure if the Oscar nod has made any material difference to his film's performance.

"You know, I mean, in terms of any kind of empirical indication, maybe," he says.  "I don't know if it still is, but, for a while there, this past week, it ("Abacus") was the number one doc on iTunes, so I like that."

The 90th Academy Awards ceremony will take place at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood on March 4, 2018.