The Revenant and Sicario take top location awards

DiCaprio won an Oscar earlier this year for his performance as a fur trapper struggling for survival in the brutal wilds of the early-19th century Mid-West.

Production took place largely in the wilderness around Calgary in Alberta, Canada. Filming took a full nine months as the team shot using only natural light and often in remote parts of the province.

Sicario’s locations team of S Todd Christensen and Shani Orona took the prize for Outstanding Locations in a Contemporary Film. The film stars Emily Blunt as an FBI agent taking on a brutal drug cartel operating between the US and Mexico. Production was based in New Mexico, which offers a 25% filming incentive for features.

In television, Robert Boake and Tate Araez won for their work on Game of Thrones, which uses Belfast as a production base and has also filmed on location in countries including Iceland and Croatia.

Marco Giacalone and Bill Bowling won in the contemporary TV category for the Netflix sci-fi series Sense8, which filmed around the world and entirely on location.

FilmLA was honoured as the year’s top film commission and Janice Polley, a long-term collaborator of director Michael Mann, received the Lifetime Achievement Award.

Image: Kimberley French/Twentieth Century Fox