Baftas 2024: Oppenheimer’s passion and ambition stomps over the opposition once again
As Samuel Goldwyn apocryphally remarked in 1945: “This A-bomb – it’s dynamite!!” With 13 Bafta nominations, Christopher Nolan’s mighty historical bio-epic Oppenheimer continues its triumphal march through awards season. It stars Cillian Murphy as the wartime inventor of nuclear weaponry J Robert Oppenheimer, galvanised by America’s race to get the bomb before the Nazis, transfixed by the dark ecstasy of the successful Trinity test in the New Mexico desert, then agonised with his postwar burden of guilt and horror. The Bafta voters have responded passionately to the scale, ambition and seriousness of this work from this remarkable British director; its wartime setting also reinforces its prestige-eligibility (like last year’s Bafta nomination list which overwhelmingly favoured All Quiet on the Western Front).
Barbie, the opposite side of the #Barbenheimer coin, has been received slightly more coolly by Bafta voters, with five nominations, including leading actress for Margot Robbie and supporting actor for Ryan Gosling’s Kendearing, Kentrancing (etc etc) turn and production design for the amazing work from Sarah Greenwood and Katie Spencer. Following Oppenheimer, however, with 11 nominations is Yorgos Lanthimos’s towering black-comic spectacle Poor Things (though no director nomination for Lanthimos himself); Emma Stone gets a much-deserved best actress nod for her performance as Bella Baxter, the alt-Victorian fallen woman and would-be suicide brought back to life in a bizarre Frankensteinian experiment. Betting against a Stone win would be rash.
Elsewhere, what an achievement for the superb German star Sandra Hüller, who is nominated for best actress for her brilliant lead performance in Justine Triet’s courtroom drama Anatomy of a Fall, playing a fashionable author on trial for murdering her husband; she is also nominated for best supporting actress for Jonathan Glazer’s excoriating Holocaust nightmare The Zone of Interest, playing the demure wife of the Auschwitz camp commandant who leads her placid life of bürgerlich respectability in a handsome house just outside the barbed wire fence. It is interesting to compare this film with Oppenheimer as studies of denied guilt and shame.
Martin Scorsese’s haunting truecrime movie Killers of the Flower Moon has a strong hold on awards-voters’ attention – though no acting nods for its stars Lily Gladstone and Leonardo DiCaprio – and this too has a genocidal subject, perhaps the nearest thing to a common theme emerging from this awards season; it is about the mass murder of Osage people to undermine their oil entitlements at the beginning of the 20th century, chillingly mimicking the larger attempted erasure of Native Americans in US history. Alexander Payne’s melancholy 70s dramedy The Holdovers has a strong showing; Bafta lead-actor nominee Paul Giamatti, playing the grumpy boarding school teacher, became a social
media sensation after his victory at the Golden Globes by dining later at his beloved In-N-Out Burger restaurant in LA. Perhaps after a Bafta win he can get stuck into a Nando’s.
As for the snubs – well, only three nods for Celine Song’s Past Lives is a travesty, and to miss it off the best film and best director list is disappointing. Emerald Fennell’s Brideshead 2.0 psychothriller Saltburn matches Barbie with five nominations, but this doesn’t represent how much of a talking point it’s been, chiefly for, it is alleged, being uncritically and unsatirically infatuated with its own Tatlermag poshness. Maybe. But it’s directed and shot with gusto and Rosamund Pike has her well-deserved best supporting actress nod as the beautiful, distrait chatelaine of Saltburn itself.
The soul of the Baftas has always been in the outstanding British film and outstanding British debut categories, and Molly Manning Walker’s terrific How to Have Sex is well rewarded in both – but I was sad to see nothing for Glenda Jackson and Michael Caine in The Great Escaper, nor anything for Sam H Freeman and Ng Choon Ping’s gripping psychodrama Femme.
So the mysterious awards-think consensus is coalescing around a single film and that is Oppenheimer. Yet maybe The Zone of Interest and Killers of the Flower Moon will split the “serious” vote with Nolan’s film – and Poor Things and Emma Stone, in all their dysfunctional craziness, will clean up on the night.
• Join Carey Mulligan on 26 January for a livestreamed Guardian Live event where she will discuss the making of her latest film, Maestro. Tickets available here