So with the announcement of the Oscar nomination list, it’s not really a case of #Barbenheimer, last summer’s hashtag box office craze which balanced serious and fluffy, yin and yang, but #Poorthingsheimer or #Killersoftheflowermoonheimer or really just … #Oppenheimer.
Christopher Nolan’s epic and panoramic study of J Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the A-bomb played by Cillian Murphy, pulls ahead of the field with 13 nominations, followed by Yorgos Lanthimos’s hilarious-macabre steampunk nightmare Poor Things with 11, Martin Scorsese’s powerful Killers of the Flower Moon with 10 … and Barbie has eight. The Academy has rather turned away from the DayGlo-coloured toy fantasy in favour of historical seriousness. Barbie’s director Greta Gerwig has been snubbed in the director category, and perhaps most hurtfully for the film’s fans, Margot Robbie has been shut out of the best actress category. The awards-think consensus has decided that Oppenheimer is the pre-eminent blue-chip awards contender and, yes, it is now almost certain that Christopher Nolan is going to get his first Oscar for best director.
But best film? That field could be more open than everyone assumes. The various fan-constituencies for Oppenheimer, Poor Things, Barbie, The Holdovers et al could split the vote allowing a much-fancied foreign language picture to come through, the way Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite did. So maybe Celine Song’s Past Lives, the superb story of a childhood romance revisited in adulthood, could cause an almighty upset. The same thing could even be achieved by Justine Triet’s courtroom drama Anatomy of a Fall or indeed Jonathan Glazer’s harrowing Holocaust drama, The Zone of Interest, freely adapted from the Martin Amis novel, which as well as its best picture nomination also has the distinction of being the first UK movie to get a best international film nomination in almost 25 years.
For best actress, Emma Stone’s black-comic performance in Poor Things, eye-catchingly marvellous as it is, may not be a lock either. Lily Gladstone has cast a spell over many Academy voters with her quiet and almost Zen address to the camera in Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, playing the Native American woman at the centre of a murderous racist conspiracy to defraud her people of their oil entitlements. She might make history as the first Native American winner in this category (she is already the first Native American nominee). And also there is the late-breaking news of Annette Bening, a wildly popular nominee for her irresistibly crowd-pleasing underdog turn in Nyad, playing the endurance swimmer Diane Nyad who faced ageism and sexism in her quest to swim from Cuba to Florida in her 60s.
Paul Giamatti looks like being the frontrunner for best actor, even ahead of Cillian Murphy: audiences have loved the warmth, subtlety and vulnerability of his performance in Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers, as the sad boarding-school teacher who has to look after the “holdovers”, the kids who have to stay in school over the Christmas holidays. Leonardo DiCaprio (from Killers of the Flower Moon) was left out of this category, rightly or wrongly, leaving us with the excellent Jeffrey Wright in American Fiction, playing the gloomy highbrow literary academic who writes an obviously absurd hoax “ghetto” novel under a pen name in order to satirise the way black culture is ghettoised by the white gatekeepers – and meets a fate similar to that endured by Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom in The Producers. Bradley Cooper has a nod for his expertly crafted and heartfelt impersonation of Leonard Bernstein, which might yet win, and Colman Domingo is in there for his portrayal of 60s gay black campaigner Bayard Rustin. As for other snubs, I insist on mentioning Joaquin Phoenix’s excellent Napoleon: raucous, haughty, funny and charismatic.
As for the supporting performances, Da’Vine Joy Randolph would deserve it for her wonderful Miss Lamb in The Holdovers. Oddly, Robert Downey Jr is considered a shoo-in for his so-so performance as Oppenheimer’s nemesis Lewis Strauss, although I think this overrated contribution is the most uninteresting of the list, which includes Ryan Gosling’s uproarious Ken, Robert De Niro’s sinister farmsteader in Killers of the Flower Moon, Sterling K Brown’s heartbreakingly sad brother figure in American Fiction and Mark Ruffalo’s glorious moustachioed bounder in Poor Things – the funniest movie cad since Terry-Thomas.
