Where to stream the 2024 Oscar nominees
The nominees for the 96th Academy Awards were announced Tuesday morning, and the summer’s “Barbenheimer” phenomenon proved to be a dominant duo once again, with “Oppenheimer” leading the way with 13 nominations and “Barbie” collecting eight. A handful of major awards contenders are still exclusively in theaters, most notably “American Fiction,” “Poor Things” and “The Zone of Interest,” which are all best picture nominees. But the vast majority of titles are currently available to stream or rent on various platforms. Here’s a complete rundown of where to find all the major awards hopefuls.
“Oppenheimer”
Nominated for: Best picture, director, actor, supporting actor, supporting actress, adapted screenplay, production design, costume design, cinematography, editing, makeup and hairstyling, sound, original score.
Conjuring the dark wizardry of the Manhattan Project, director Christopher Nolan turned the Trinity test into a seat-rumbling summer spectacle, placing it at the center of “Oppenheimer” like the nuclear core of 20th- century history. But there’s a disturbing intimacy to the film as well, with Cillian Murphy’s tremulous J. Robert Oppenheimer leading an unstable band of scientists while nearly drowning in uncharted political and ethical waters. In exploring the origins of a technological boogeyman that continues to haunt humanity, Nolan embraces the contradictions of the flawed, brilliant man whose spirit seems to embody it.
How to watch: Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and Youtube.
“Barbie”
Nominated for: Best picture, supporting actor, supporting actress, adapted screenplay, production design, costume design, original song (two nominees).
Perhaps “Barbie” was destined to become the year’s biggest boxoffice phenomenon, but Greta Gerwig had to thread a very thin needle in creating a pop entertainment of buoyancy and sub
stance. While playing off the fizzy appeal of the fashionable plastic doll that has lined toy shelves for over half a century, Gerwig seizes the opportunity to reflect on the distance between Barbie’s vision of womanhood and the troubling messiness of reality. As Gerwig’s bruised idealist, Margot Robbie’s Barbie keeps the tone light as she journeys from the matriarchal paradise of Barbieland to the real world, which isn’t the utopia she might have imagined.
How to watch: Stream it on Max. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and Youtube.
“Killers of the Flower Moon”
Nominated for: Best picture, director, actress, supporting actor, production design, costume design, cinematography, editing, original score, original song.
The nativist skirmishes and corruption that have defined so many of Martin Scorsese’s gangster (and non-gangster) dramas surface again in this sprawling epic of American greed and violence, based on David Grann’s historical nonfiction book. Set in the oil-rich Osage territory of 1920s Oklahoma, “Killers of the Flower Moon” looks into a murderous conspiracy to wrest claim rights away from the native population. At the film’s center is the toxic love story between an Osage woman ( Lily Gladstone) and an impressionable war veteran (Leonardo Dicaprio) whose affection for her is clouded by his relationship to his scheming uncle (Robert De Niro) and a taste for the finer things.
How to watch: Stream it on Apple TV+. Buy it on Amazon, Vudu, Google Play and Youtube.
“The Holdovers”
Nominated for: Best picture, actor, supporting actress, original screenplay, editing.
Reuniting for the first time since “Sideways” nearly 20 years ago, director Alexander Payne and his lovably cantankerous star, Paul Giamatti, have made a film (destined to become a future holiday staple) about the relationship between three people left to themselves over Christmas in 1970. Giamatti stars as the least- liked teacher at an elite New England boarding school, assigned to babysit the small handful of students whose parents didn’t pick them up for the break. After a good deal of friction, he starts to forge a warmer relationship with one troubled student (Dominic Sessa) and the school’s head cook ( Da’vine Joy Randolph), who’s facing her first Christmas since losing her son in Vietnam.
How to watch: Stream it on Peacock. Buy it on Apple TV, Google Play, Youtube, Vudu and Amazon.
“Maestro”
Nominated for: Best picture, actor, actress, original screenplay, cinematography, makeup and hairstyling, sound.
In his follow- up to “A Star Is Born,” director/actor Bradley Cooper again turns to the emotionally turbulent life of a musician, casting himself as Leonard Bernstein, the famed American conductor and composer who lived a double life in full. Starting in lustrous black and white, “Maestro” depicts
the young Bernstein’s intoxicating rise through the New York Philharmonic and his romance with stage actress Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan) in the 1940s. The film then shifts to color in later decades, as Bernstein’s sexual dalliances and substance abuse take their toll on a marriage that’s under sharp public scrutiny.
How to watch: Stream it on Netflix.
“Anatomy of a Fall”
Nominated for: Best picture, director, actress, original screenplay, editing.
The winner of the Palme d’or at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, Justine Triet’s penetrating drama sounds like a routine didshe- or- didn’t- she courtroom procedural, as a nov
elist (Sandra Hüller) stands trial for killing her husband at their Alpine chalet. Yet the courtroom theatrics open up a deeper investigation into a difficult marriage and the toll it exacts on the couple’s legally blind son ( Milo Machado Graner), who discovers the body. Though the woman’s innocence is at stake, Triet is more compelled by the domestic tensions leading up to the death and the fallout from the trial.
How to watch: Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and Youtube.
“Past Lives”
Nominated for: Best picture, original screenplay.
In her heart-rending feature debut as a writer- director, playwright Celine Song offers a what-if romantic scenario that pulls at the identity of a happily married woman in New York, even decades after she and her family moved from South Korea. Once extremely close childhood friends, Nora (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung ( Teo Yoo) reconnect as adults on social media and meet again in America, where they reminisce and inevitably begin to wonder about the path not taken. Comparisons to Richard Linklater’s “Sunrise” trilogy may
be inevitable, but the temptation and longing in “Past Lives” is uniquely complicated by the cultural crosswinds that affect Nora, Hae Sung and Nora’s American husband (John Magaro), who waits patiently in the wings.
How to watch: Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and Youtube.
“Nyad”
Nominated for: Best actress, supporting actress.
After directing a series of documentaries about seemingly impossible physical feats, like scaling the 3,000-foot El Capitan rock wall without ropes (“Free Solo”) or pulling off the Thailand cave rescue (“The
Rescue”), Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin make a natural transition to features with this biopic about distance swimmer Diana Nyad. Nyad (Annette Bening) had set several distance records in the 1970s, but the film focuses on her effort to swim from Cuba to Florida at the age of 64, with help from her close friend Bonnie Stoll (Jodie Foster). Vasarhelyi and Chin once again tap into the indomitable spirit of an athlete willing to court death to push the limits.
How to watch: Stream it on Netflix.
“May December”
Nominated for: Original screenplay.
With their prismatic take on a tabloid scandal that echoes the Mary Kay Letourneau case, director Todd Haynes and screenwriter Samy Burch adopt a seriocomic tone that echoes high art like “Persona” one minute and early 2000s USA Network fodder the next. Natalie Portman stars as a semifamous actress who travels to Savannah, Georgia, to study for the role of a Letourneau- like woman (Julianne Moore) who was caught having sex with a seventh- grade boy, but wound up marrying him and having children after a prison stint. The actress’s presence, asking simple questions that the couple has been studiously avoiding, destabilizes their relationship, particularly the much- younger husband (Charles Melton), who starts to reflect on what happened to him.
How to watch: Stream it on Netflix.
“Rustin”
Nominated for: Best actor.
In championing a lessheralded yet fascinatingly multidimensional figure in the civil rights movement, “Rustin” gains much of its power from Colman Domingo’s electrifying lead performance as Bayard Rustin, a gay activist and socialist who had the ear of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The action leads up to Rustin’s greatest triumph as an organizer, the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech in front of an estimated 250,000 people. But “Rustin” digs into the intense internal divisions within the movement over holding the march as a message to Democratic frontrunner John F. Kennedy. It also explores the depth of Rustin’s personal passion for economic justice.
How to watch: Stream it on Netflix.