The nominees for the 96th Academy Awards are officially here, and this year’s biggest winner is set to be “Oppenheimer.” The three-hour drama is currently nominated for 13 awards, including Best Picture.
The nominees for this year’s ceremony were announced live Tuesday morning by Jack Quaid, who stars in “Oppenheimer” as Richard Feynman) and Zazie Beetz.
“Oppenheimer,” directed by Christopher Nolan, tells the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) and his life leading up to, during and following the creation of the atomic bomb and its dropping on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The film has been a darling of the award circuit over the past few months, earning several accolades for its cast and crew. Some of the awards the film is up for include the Best Picture nomination, as well as Best Actor and Supporting Actors for Cillian Murphy, Robert Downey Jr. and Emily Blunt. Nolan is also expected to win his first Best Director Oscar for the film.
While “Oppenheimer” has the most nominations, not all wins are guaranteed. Some of the other films to garner multiple nominations include “Poor Things,” “American Fiction,” “The Holdovers” and Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon.” Speaking of Scorsese, his latest historical film has made history itself. Lily Gladstone is the first Native
American woman in history to be nominated for Best Actress.
Of all the candidates this year, the dark horse throughout awards season has been Bradley Cooper’s second directorial effort “Maestro.” The Netflix biopic received critical praise, and Cooper has campaigned hard for the gold, but so far, the film has come up relatively empty-handed when it comes to those coveted prizes.
Like every year, for every well-deserved nomination, there is the inevitable snubs. Arguably, one of the biggest and most controversial has been the exclusion of Margot Robbie and Greta Gerwig for their efforts in “Barbie.” The blockbuster-hit walked away with eight nominations, including Best Picture. Despite this, Gerwig did not see her name up on the list for Best Director, and only Robbie’s co-stars Ryan Gosling and America Ferrera were nominated in any acting categories.
Other major missing nominees from this year’s list of contenders include “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” in Best Original Score which lost out to “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.” Despite last year being a massive win for Asian American representation, Charles Melton (“May December”) and Greta Lee (“Past Lives”) were left off the list for their respective acting categories.
The 96th Academy Awards will air later than usual on Sunday, March 10, on ABC, beginning at 7 p.m. The show was delayed due to the writers’ and actors’ strike from earlier in the summer.
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