from AP Worldstream / by Dan Molinski

Catalina Sandino Moreno, the Colombian actress nominated for the best actress Academy Award, was unable to get an acting job in her hometown - not even in a soap opera - purportedly because casting directors thought she couldn’t act, her brother says.

“Those dudes must be kicking themselves now,” Nicolas Sandino Moreno said Tuesday after hearing his sister was nominated for her role in “Maria Full of Grace,” her first movie appearance.

“Man, I am so proud of my sister’s triumph!” said the 16-year-old.

The nomination came as a shock for many Colombians. When the film was released here in April, it appeared in only two dozen theaters in this country of 44 million people and was pulled quickly amid poor ticket sales.

“It was far from a hit,” said Carlos Llano, distribution manager for Cine Colombia, which controls Colombia’s movie releases.

Sandino plays a teenage drug mule in the film, which was set in this Andean nation mired in a 40-year guerril la war but filmed in neighboring Ecuador.

Colombians are familiar with other celebrity exports, such as hip-shaking pop star Shakira and tattooed rocker Juanes, but the response here to Sandino’s Oscar nomination was: “Catalina who?”

Sandino, a 23-year-old Bogota native who now calls New York home, left Colombia three years ago partly because of her lack of success.

“I was in Colombia, no one took my picture and then suddenly here with this movie everybody wants a picture,” she told The Associated Press in New York after being nominated Tuesday.

Many Colombian actresses who have achieved success in their homeland have had their breasts enlarged or other cosmetic surgery. With Sandino apparently doing without such enhancements, Colombia’s main newspaper, El Tiempo, asked readers on its Web site: “What is Catalina Sandino’s magic?”

“The magic is that she didn’t get silicone, nor liposuction, nor did she dye her hair yellow, nor did she model in a G-string,” answered reader Car los Ramirez. “The magic is that she studied and prepared.”

In light of the Oscar nod, Llano said Cine Colombia would be giving the film another chance.

“We’re rereleasing it Friday afternoon, and something tells me it’s going to do great,” he said.