Dev Patel just brought the cutest date to the Oscars 2017

And we love him even more for it

Academy Award nominee Dev Patel turned up to the Oscars 2017 on Sunday with the sweetest date, his mum.

This is the 26-year-old actor’s first Oscar nomination, with both him and his onscreen mother, Nicole Kidman, receiving Oscar nods in the Best Supporting Actor and Actress categories.

It was his real mother, Anita Patel, however, who he brought as his date to the awards ceremony held at the Dolby Theatre, Los Angeles.

Bringing your mum as a date is a classic Hollywood move, made by many Oscar nominees over the years, from Ryan Gosling to Leonardo DiCaprio.

Dev’s choice to bring his mother, however, is actually a fitting tribute to Lion, the film that he is nominated for.

Lion, also nominated this year for Academy Awards in the Cinematography, Original Score and Adapted Screenplay categories, is a film adaptation of the non-fiction book, A Long Way Home, directed by Garth Davis.

Based on the story of Saroo Brierley, the film follows a five-year-old Indian boy who mistakenly gets on the wrong train and is lost, thousands of miles from home. Adopted by a couple in Australia, it is not until 25 years later that he manages to locate his hometown and find his long-lost mother.

‘I went to India and I travelled the trains. I wrote diaries, visited orphanages’, Dev said of getting into character. ‘It was a process of trying to create genuine memories we could key into the scenes. I wanted to commit every fibre of my being to getting this right. The script demands it and Saroo deserves it.’