The 32-year-old Costa Rican music editor is making history tonight as the first person from his country ever nominated for an Academy Award. There is a particular kind of quiet that exists in a film before the music swells, a silence shaped by someone who understands exactly when sound should speak and when it should step aside.
Felipe Pacheco has spent his career mastering that art, and tonight, at the 98th Academy Awards ceremony at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, he has a chance to walk away with an Oscar for it. Pacheco is the first Costa Rican ever nominated for an Academy Award, a landmark that would have seemed improbable to the teenager who left his hometown more than a decade ago with nothing but ambition and a guitar.
Born and raised in Piedades de Santa Ana, Pacheco left Costa Rica at just 18, driven by a powerful dream of building a life in music. While his initial passion was the guitar, his path evolved as he discovered a profound interest in the technical and narrative power of sound engineering and music editing, a pivot that would ultimately define his professional trajectory. To hone his newfound craft, he enrolled in the world-renowned Berklee College of Music, a move that provided him with a formidable foundation in the art and science of sound.
That foundation proved transformative. Pacheco carved out a career in Hollywood as a music editor, the specialist responsible for synchronizing, editing, and placing music within a film’s sonic fabric, ensuring that every score cue lands at precisely the right emotional moment. It is painstaking, invisible work that audiences rarely notice when done brilliantly, and notice immediately when it goes wrong.
His Oscar-nominated work on Sinners, Ryan Coogler’s audacious Southern Gothic thriller set in 1932 Mississippi, showcases exactly that brilliance. The film builds its atmosphere through tension, silence, and psychological sound environments, functioning almost as an extension of suspense and amplifying the sense of threat running through the narrative. The sound team includes two Oscar winners: Benjamin Burtt, honored for WALL-E, and Steve Boeddeker, who won for All Is Lost, formidable company that Pacheco holds his own alongside.
The Costa Rican shares the nomination with colleagues Chris Welcker, Benjamin A. Burtt, Brandon Proctor, and Steve Boeddeker, their collective effort creating a soundscape so compelling it stood out in a year of exceptional cinematic achievements.
The question on everyone’s lips tonight is whether Sinners can convert its extraordinary awards season momentum into a win. The film leads this year’s nominations with a record-breaking 16 nods, the most for any single film in Oscar history, including Best Picture, Director, and Actor for Michael B. Jordan. It won both the music editing and feature dialogue/ADR prizes at the MPSE Golden Reel Awards.
However, the race for Best Sound is genuinely competitive. F1 has swept the Cinema Audio Society award, Critics Choice, AMPS, and BAFTA, and every film with that combination since 2013 has gone on to win the Oscar.
