Stars who should take home an Oscar
• It is time when attention turns to the Academy Awards
With only the Screen Actors Guild Awards still to be announced ahead of the 2024 Oscar announcement on March 11, it’s time to make some calls about who will, could and should go home with the film industry’s most coveted statues.
BEST PICTURE The nominees:
● American Fiction
● Anatomy of a Fall
● Barbie
● The Holdovers
● Killers of the Flower Moon
● Maestro
● Oppenheimer
● Past Lives
● Poor Things
● The Zone of Interest
Who will win:
Oppenheimer. With wins in the bag for Christopher Nolan at the Director’s Guild and Bafta awards, it’s likely that the academy will give the nod to the British director’s awesome big-screen spectacle about Robert Oppenheimer and the making of the atomic bomb.
With five previous nominations proving unsuccessful, Nolan — the smartest kid playing in the sandbox of modern blockbusters — will be hoping that he makes a clean sweep in all three of the categories he’s personally nominated for this year — best picture, directing and adapted screenplay.
Who could win:
Poor Things. Yorgos Lanthimos’ acclaimed and popular adaptation of the speculative Victorian fantasy by Alasdair
Gray has been steadily earning awards and critical plaudits for its imaginative world-building and the stellar performance from lead Emma Stone. It’s not an easy film for viewers or Oscar voters, but it may still have a chance.
Who should win:
While I’m a huge admirer and fan of Oppenheimer, for my money the most cinematically innovative film on the 2024 list is Jonathan Glazer’s deeply uncomfortable and harrowing examination of the banality of holocaust evil The Zone of Interest. Using the tools of cinema to new and awesomely chilling effect, its portrait of the family life of Auschwitz commander Rudolf Höss in the shadow of mass-scale, never shown industrial-scale murder is the most intelligent and provocative holocaust drama ever put on screen.
BEST DIRECTOR
The nominees:
● Christopher Nolan
— Oppenheimer
● Martin Scorsese — Killers of the Flower Moon
● Justine Trier — Anatomy of a Fall
● Jonathan Glazer — The Zone of Interest
● Yorgos Lanthimos — Poor Things
Who will win:
Christopher Nolan. After years of critical acclaim and boxoffice success, Nolan’s lack of a best director statue is increasingly bizarre, but with Oppenheimer’s success on the awards circuit, it looks as if this will be the year the academy finally makes things right for a director whose ability to meld smart ideas with big-screen spectacle is rarely equalled.
Who could win:
I would like nothing better than to see the small in stature, giant of modern American cinema, indefatigable octogenarian Martin Scorsese step up to the podium to receive only his second best director Oscar for what is one of his most epic, deeply personal and passionate films. Even though he may not be rewarded come Oscar night, you can be sure that there is plenty of innovative filmmaking gas left in Scorsese’s probing cinematic tank.
Who should win:
Christopher Nolan.
BEST ACTRESS
The nominees:
● Emma Stone — Poor Things
● Lily Gladstone — Killers of the Flower Moon
● Sandra Hüller — Anatomy of a Fall
● Carey Mulligan — Maestro
● Annette Bening — Nyad
Who will win:
Lily Gladstone’s quietly gutwrenching turn as the Osage woman at the centre of nefarious murderous plots by money-grubbing white men to swindle her and her family out of their oil money has placed the actress deservingly in the spotlight and should see her take home the ultimate prize on the night.
It would also mark a significant first for the Oscars as Gladstone would be the first actor of Native American origin to win the award.
Who could win:
Emma Stone for her dedicated, black-humoured and chameleon turn as Bella Baxter, the Frankenstein figure at the centre of Poor Things. It’ sa masterclass in exuberant enjoyment at the film’s weirdness while still managing to convey the complex changes experienced by a woman seeking liberation in the face of suffocating misogyny.
Who should win:
Lily Gladstone.
BEST ACTOR
The nominees:
● Bradley Cooper — Maestro
● Colman Domingo — Rustin
● Paul Giamatti — The Holdovers
● Cillian Murphy
— Oppenheimer
● Jeffrey Wright — American Fiction
Who will win:
Paul Giamatti for his standout turn as a beaten down 1970s prep-school classics teacher in Alexander Payne’s intelligent twist on the Christmas movie, The Holdovers.
Though he was ignored by the academy for his previous excellent work in the 2004 Payne collaboration Sideways,
Giamatti has consistently been one of the movie’s hardestworking and unshowy performers and his work here elevates the film above its genre expectations.
Who could win:
Cillian Murphy. The highcheekboned, sensitive blueeyed Irishman has not had as many opportunities to take leading roles on the big screen as you would expect and that’ sa criminal oversight as evidenced by his complex and emotionally engaging performance as Robert Oppenheimer —a sensitive man thrown into the violent maelstrom of war thanks to a combination of his scientific brilliance and personal hubris that saw him become the unwilling father of the atomic age.
Who should win:
Paul Giamatti.
BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
The nominees:
● Emily Blunt — Oppenheimer
● Danielle Brooks — The Color Purple
● America Ferrara — Barbie
● Jodie Foster — Nyad
● Da’Vine Joy Randolph
— The Holdovers
Who will win:
Da’Vine Joy Randolph. Though relatively unknown to movie audiences, the actress is a much-lauded theatre veteran whose performance as a prepschool cook and grieving mother in The Holdovers has earned her deserved critical acclaim and seen her sweep the awards circuit in the best supporting actress category.
It would be surprising were Oscar voters not to follow suit and give Randolph the kudos she so evidently deserves.
Who could win:
You can never discount twotime best actress winner Jodie Foster, who received her first nomination for best supporting actress in 1977 as a 15-year-old for her performance as a sex worker in Martin Scorsese’s seminal Taxi Driver.
In Nyad, an inspirational true story drama about athlete Diana Nyad’s commitment at age 60 to swim from Cuba to Florida, Foster delivers a solidly engaging performance as longsuffering best friend and coach Bonnie Stoll that may still see her add another statue to her mantlepiece.
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
The nominees:
● Sterling K Brown — American Fiction
● Robert De Niro — Killers of the Flower Moon
● Robert Downey Jr
— Oppenheimer
● Ryan Gosling — Barbie
● Mark Ruffalo — Poor Things
Who will win:
Robert Downey Jr. He probably should have won a best actor award back in the bad old, drug-addled days of 1993 for his performance as Charlie Chaplin in Richard Attenborough’s biopic, but though he has since cleaned up his act and become one of Hollywood’s most bankable and highly paid stars, Downey hasn’t been on as many awards nominations list as his legions of admirers believe he should have.
With universal acclaim for his menacing turn as the villainous Oppenheimer Lewis Strauss and most of the season’s awards already in the bag, it seems that this will finally be his year.
Who could win:
Ryan Gosling for his hugely enjoyable tongue-in-cheek, against-type performance as Ken in Greta Gerwig’s smartly funny blockbuster.
Throwing himself with unabandoned joy into the brightly coloured world, overthe-top outfits and gleeful pop singing of Barbieland, Gosling had some of the hardest-toresist fun of anyone on the big screen last year.