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.
