Historical drama Oppenheimer leads the nominations at the BAFTA Awards in London this weekend, but will the film about the making of the atomic bomb during World War II, which has already won awards elsewhere, be the winner of the night ?
Directed by Britain's Christopher Nolan, Oppenheimer, one of last year's highest-grossing films, has 13 nominations for the major British film awards, followed by the sex-charged gothic comedy Poor Creatures, starring Emma Stone, with 11.
Hotspot, about a family living next to Auschwitz, has nine nominations and, like Poor People, is in the running for best British film.
“Because it's the BAFTAs, you get that local love. So we may see a few more awards for Hotspot," Digital Spy film editor Ian Sandwell told Reuters. "But I feel Oppenheimer is so strong in all the categories that he will end up with the most the victories."
Oppenheimer dominated the Golden Globes with five wins and leads the nominations for next month's Academy Awards.
At the BAFTAs, it will compete for best film alongside Poor Things, Killers of the Flower Moon, about the murders of members of the Osage Nation in the 1920s, the courtroom drama Anatomy of a Fall, and The Holdovers, a comedy set in a boarding school for children.
"I think Oppenheimer is certainly the best film," Tim Richards, founder and chief executive of cinema operator Vue International, told Reuters. "Chris Nolan is British and with the BAFTAs, he is without a doubt one of the most respected and loved directors in the business and I think he should be up there for best director as well."
Based on the 2005 biography American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, Oppenheimer stars Cillian Murphy as American theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer.
Murphy and Stone currently lead the betting odds to win the major acting categories. Da'Vine Joy Randolph has already won several awards for her supporting actress role in The Holdovers and she is expected to win again at the BAFTAs. But will Murphy's Oppenheimer co-star and fellow Golden Globe winner Robert Downey Jr. also make it as a supporting actor?
"I think (the supporting actor) is the one we're most likely to get a little surprise with, and I think it's going to be Paul Mescal (for All of Us Strangers)," Sandwell said.
Barbie, the highest-grossing film of 2023, has five nominations in total, but Greta Gerwig's omission from the director category raised eyebrows. "'It was the movie that seems to have been overlooked by both the Academy (Awards) and BAFTA members and is a mystery," Richards said.
The BAFTAs will be held on Sunday at the Royal Festival Hall in London.
