from Fort Worth Star-Telegram / by Christopher Kelly

DALLAS - Catalina Sandino Moreno. Remember the name. Come next Oscar season, you’re going to be hearing it a lot.

Yes, August might be early for such predictions. But this one you can take to the bank: Moreno - a 23-year-old Colombian woman making her acting debut in the drama “Maria Full of Grace” - is going to be one of the five nominees for the Best Actress Oscar come January.

A lot of blustery hype? Not when you consider that this time last year another unknown actress was dazzling critics and audiences, a little girl named Keisha Castle-Hughes, in the movie “Whale Rider.” Castle-Hughes went on to become this year’s biggest surprise nominee. Hollywood loves its come-out-of-nowhere, up-from-your-bootstraps, a-star-is-born-overnight sagas, and Catalina Sandino Moreno’s is especially gripping.

She was studying advertising in Bogota when a friend told her about an open-call audition. “I just went because I was very curious to see this American guy trying to make a Colombian movie,” Moreno explained recently, before a benefit screening of “Maria Full of Grace” in Dallas.

Actually, the American guy’s team was conducting the auditions. The American guy - California-born, New York-based Joshua Marston - was in New York, terrified that his debut film was going to fall apart because he couldn’t find a lead actress.

“Over the course of three months, we saw something on the order of 900 girls,” Marston says. “And I couldn’t find the right one. Literally, the morning after we postponed the shoot, another tape came in from Colombia, with another dozen auditions. She was the first one on the tape. … I went to Colombia and had to pretend that I hadn’t already decided to cast her, because I wanted to see her do something in front of me. I was really trying to play it cool.”

Marston hit paydirt indeed. As Maria - a naive, poor girl working on a flower plantation who travels to New York City as a drug mule, with dozens of pellets of heroin in her stomach - Moreno is in virtually every scene of the movie. The fledgling actress gives us an ordinary girl who is no hero. Her Maria is stubborn, selfish, apt to tell lies - but also a victim of her own lousy circumstances and naivete. The actress pulls all of this off with surprisingly little dialogue; mostly, we watch as a gallery of emotions dances across her wide-open face.

It helps that she’s so beautiful - with a mane of dark hair that falls past her shoulders and brown eyes so deep as to be teasingly elusive, as if she’s keeping a secret the rest of us will never be able to learn. The camera could never possibly get enough of her.

“Maria Full of Grace” premiered in January at the Sundance Film Festival, where it was one of the strongest entries in the competition (it won the Audience Award there), and where all the buzz seemed to center on Moreno. That buzz carried to the Berlin Film Festival in February, where Moreno won the festival’s best actress award. That’s when Moreno realized she was going to have to start practicing at this whole “movie star” thing.

“After Berlin,” she says now, “everyone knew my name, and everybody was taking a picture of me. I didn’t have an autograph. I was just trying to print my name like a superstar. Even today, I don’t have an autograph. I just have my little signature.”

In person, Moreno is a bit of a fidget, albeit an endearing one. She’s apt to pull her black turtleneck sweater up over her mouth in between questions, or mess with her hair, pinning it up and letting it fall back down. When an audience member gushingly compliments her in Spanish on her performance, she seems to be on the verge of blushing. She’s a case study of the movie star before a thick layer of polish has been applied.

But when she speaks about her work, she’s mature, intelligent, razor-sharp in her analysis. She claims she has never acted before, but if that’s the case, she must have watched every episode of “Inside the Actor’s Studio” ever recorded.

“I never learned to swallow the pellets,” she says, of the most notable scene in the film, where Maria practices swallowing pellets of heroin by trying to swallow plump, purple grapes. “In my preparations, I was preparing to play a 17-year-old girl who worked in a flower plantation. I was not preparing to play a drug mule. In my preparations, I didn’t want to talk to people who have done this. I didn’t want Maria to have preconceptions of how to be a drug mule.”

So how does one navigate the potentially rocky road from Sundance darling to, well, potential Oscar nominee and bonafide international movie star? After “Maria Full of Grace” wrapped production, she moved to New York City and took acting classes (even though she stresses that she misses Bogota, where her mother is a pathologist and her father a veterinarian). She’s presently reading every script that is sent to her. (”The only real script I’ve read is “Maria,” so I need to learn more of what’s out there.”) Perhaps most important, she’s secured an agent at William Morris, courtesy of the HBO executives who helped produce “Maria Full of Grace.”

She explains: “In Sundance, I had a lot of business cards from agents, lawyers, managers, from everybody. I’m new. I don’t know who’s good, who’s not good, who’s a liar, who’s not. HBO told me, if I want help, I should give them all the cards. They really tried to help figure out who I should talk to.”

And if she could write her own ticket? She says she would like to be “Gael Garcia Bernal as a woman” - referring to the Mexican star of “Y Tu Mama Tambien” and two high-profile films this fall, “The Motorcycle Diaries” and Pedro Almodovar’s “Bad Education.” She’s excited by the way Bernal has become an international star without ever having made an English-language film.

“I’m waiting for a Spanish script,” she says. “I really want to keep acting in Spanish.”

All in due time, no doubt. For now, there are a few more stops on a promotional tour for “Maria,” a few more autographs to sign, a few more compliments to blush her way through.

Oh, and an Oscar nomination to secure. Remember, you heard it here first.