Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer tops BAFTA nominations

The British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) has announced the nominees for its film awards, which will be presented for the 77th time this year. The leader among the awarded films was Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, nominated in thirteen categories. He’s followed by Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Lost Losers with eleven nominations, Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon and Jonathan Glaser’s Zone of Interest with nine nominations each. Comments Julia Shagelman.

It is significant that British film academics, apparently, do not share everyone’s enthusiasm for Oppenheimer’s main competitor in last year’s box office, Greta Gerwig’s Barbie. The tutorial on feminism for the little ones received only five nominations, and he was not among the contenders in any category “Best movie”nor “Best Director”. In the first of them, in addition to “Oppenheimer”, “The Poor Miserables” and “Killers of the Flower Moon”, “Anatomy of a Fall” by Justine Trieu and “The Leftovers” by Alexander Payne were nominated. Trieu is also the only woman in the director’s category, where she will compete with Nolan, Glazer, Payne, as well as Bradley Cooper (“Maestro”) and Andrew Haigh (“We Are Strangers”). Nolan and Cooper have been nominated in this category before (the former for Inception and Dunkirk, the latter for A Star Is Born), but did not win; the other four are nominated for the first time.

At the ceremony, the winner, whoever he is, will receive his first director’s BAFTA, and Nolan, of course, has the best chance of doing so.

The gender imbalance in the director’s nomination, like last year, is balanced by the category “Best Debut by a British Writer, Director or Producer”. Four of the five films featured are directed by women: Savana Leaf’s Mother Earth, Molly Manning Walker’s How to Have Sex, and Is There Anybody There? Ella Glendinning and The Life of a Blue Bag by Lisa Selby and Rebecca Lloyd-Evans (co-authored with Alex Fry). Also nominated is the documentary Bobby Wine: The People’s President by Christopher Sharp and Moses Bwayo.

Meanwhile, the British have their own “Barbie” at home – this is “Saltburn” by Emirald Fennell, a modern variation on the themes of “Brideshead Revisited” and “The Talented Mr. Ripley” in fashionable color filters.

The film also received five nominations, including the second most important one at BAFTA – “Best British Film”which also included “Zone of Interest”, “The Poor Miserables”, “We Are Strangers to Everyone” and “How to Have Sex”, as well as “Napoleon” by Ridley Scott (mercilessly criticized by critics, but apparently managed to touch the patriotic strings of the British soul) , “The Old Oak” by the modern classic of island cinematography Ken Loach, “Street of Rye” by Raine Allen Miller, “Badass” by Charlotte Regan and “Wonka” by the king of good family cinema Paul King.

According to the BAFTA tradition of recent years, many nominees in the acting categories are being nominated for the first time: this time there are 11 of 23. Among them are candidates to become best actor,—Cillian Murphy (“Oppenheimer”), Colman Domingo (“Rustin”), Paul Giamatti (“The Leftovers”) and Theo Yu (“Past Lives” Celine Sohn), who will compete for victory with Barry Keoghan (“Saltburn”) and Bradley Cooper, who played the main role in his “Maestro.” In category “Best Actress” The competition will be between first-time nominees Sandra Hüller (Anatomy of a Fall), Fantasia Barrino (Blitz Bazawule’s The Color Purple) and Vivian Opara (Street of Rye), as well as Margot Robbie (Barbie), Carey Mulligan (Maestro) ) and Emma Stone (“The Poor Miserables”), who have both received nominations and, in the case of the latter two, BAFTA wins in the past.

IN nominations for supporting roles There are five BAFTA debutants. This is again Sandra Hueller, already for her work in “Zone of Interest”, Dominic Sessa and Davain Joy Randolph from “The Leftovers”, Danielle Brooks from “The Color Purple” and Jacob Elordi from “Saltburn”. In the category “Best Supporting Actor,” the academicians also noted Robert De Niro (“Killers of the Flower Moon”), Robert Downey Jr. (“Oppenheimer”), Ryan Gosling (“Barbie”) and Paul Mescal (“We’re Strangers”), and Best Supporting Actress – Emily Blunt (“Oppenheimer”), Claire Foy (“We’re Strangers”) and Rosamund Pike (Saltburn).

The choice of British academics every year coincides less and less with the preferences of their American colleagues, and therefore with the distribution of Oscars. Nevertheless, the BAFTA Awards remains one of the main events of the awards season and continues to attract interest both from experts trying to determine its “general temperature” and from viewers. In this case, the awards will be handed out on February 18, and the ceremony will be hosted for the first time by David Tennant, known for the series “Doctor Who” and many other works in film, theater and television.