The BAFTA nominees have been announced - and there are some clear frontrunners, with Poor Things and Oppenheimer sweeping the board with 11 and 13 nominations retrospectively.
Awards season is in full swing, with the Golden Globes and the Emmy Awards behind us and the Academy Awards just around the corner. We'll have to wait a little bit longer to find out who the official nominees are (you can check out our Oscars 2024 predictions here), but the prestigious BAFTAs, which will take place on Sunday 18th February 2024, might give us somewhat of an indicator of how things will go.
Oppenheimer was this year's big winner at the Golden Globes, winning five awards including Best Motion Picture (Drama). But Yorgos Lanthimos' Poor Things is proving to be the one to watch, scooping the Best Motion Picture (Musical or Comedy) award, as well as Best Actress (Musical or Comedy) for Emma Stone.
Poor Things director Yorgos Lanthimos told ScreenRant that when it came to casting the lead, Emma - who was also a producer on the film - was always the "obvious" choice. He said: "We had a great relationship during The Favourite. So, at that moment, it became obvious that it was time to do this. By having the lead actor there for everything, following the research about the world, the design, talking about the other actors who will be with her, just having her as a sounding board for what we were creating, it felt like a very different collaboration." And it's a collaboration that's most certainly paid off.
Barbie, despite being a box office smash and bringing in an estimated $1.4 billion, fell short with five nominations. Dark comedy Saltburn - undoubtedly the most talked-about film of the festive season, particularly if you watched it sat next to your grandma - also came in with five nominations, including Best British Film.
Writer and director Emerald Fennell, who was also behind the multi-award-winning A Promising Young Woman, said of the film's success (via the BBC): "I think [Saltburn's plot] really tunes into this emotional need we have that is quite unfulfilled - the really operatic, heightened emotion; a heightened sense of the erotic and of love and of hate. I just think it's something that we've been missing for a while."
Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest, based on Martin Amis's harrowing novel, which centres on Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his wife building their dream home next to a concentration camp, was another big contender, receiving nine nominations, along with Killers of The Flower Moon.
The ten films with the most BAFTA nominations are:
- 13 nominations for Oppenheimer
- 11 nominations for Poor Things
- Nine nominations for Killers of the Flower Moon and The Zone of Interest
- Seven nominations for Anatomy of a Fall, The Holdovers and Maestro
- Six nominations for All of Us Strangers
- Five nominations for Barbie and Saltburn
The British Academy Film Awards, more commonly known as the BAFTA Film Awards, will take place on 18th February 2024 in London.
