Who is nominated?
“Oppenheimer” leads the pack with 13 nominations, followed by “Poor Things,” Yorgos Lanthimos’ dark comedy about a young Victorian woman’s sexual awakening, with 11, and Martin Scorsese’s epic “Killers of the Flower Moon,” with 10. Greta Gerwig's “Barbie,” the highest-grossing film of 2023, scored eight.
In the acting races, Bradley Cooper (“Maestro”), Colman Domingo (“Rustin”), Paul Giamatti (“The Holdovers”), Cillian Murphy (“Oppenheimer”) and Jeffrey Wright (“American Fiction”) will battle it out for best Actor. Annette Bening (“Nyad”), Lily Gladstone (“Killers of the Flower Moon”), Sandra Hüller (“Anatomy of a Fall”), Carey Mulligan (“Maestro”) and Emma Stone (“Poor Things”) will face off as nominees for best actress.
What should you be on the lookout for?
The most difficult category to name is probably best actress, where the two favorites are Gladstone, who plays an Osage woman married to a white man involved in a murderous conspiracy in “Killers of the Flower Moon,” and Stone, as a adult woman. with the mind of a child in “Poor Things” inspired by “Frankenstein”.
Gladstone won his most recent showdown at the Screen Actors Guild Awards: over Stone apparent joy – and has also taken home honors from the Golden Globes, the National Board of Review and the New York Film Critics Circle. But Stone won at the BAFTAs and the Critics Choice Awards (and won his own Globe in the musical or comedy category).
The race for best actor once seemed to tilt in favor of the gregarious Giamatti, who plays a lonely, cantankerous New England boarding school teacher tasked with babysitting children during the Christmas holidays in “The Holdovers.” But in recent weeks, Murphy, who plays the titular theoretical physicist in “Oppenheimer,” has emerged as the likely winner.
How political will the speeches be?
So far, awards season has been decidedly quiet when it comes to political speeches. (“It's too tense,” one studio executive told New York Times awards season columnist Kyle Buchanan last week. “People are worried about their careers.”) But outside the United States, a BAFTA winner used that platform to criticize Israel's bombings and invasion of Gaza, which came after a Hamas-led attack on October 7.
