Daily Times

Christopher Nolan, arguably the most commercially and critically successful British director in decades, looks set to secure his first Bafta victory next month, after his latest film, Oppenheimer, was nominated in 13 categories.

The film is up for best film, director, adapted screenplay, leading actor for Cillian Murphy, supporting actress for Emily Blunt, supporting actor for Robert Downey Jr, cinematography, editing, costume design, makeup and hair, original score, production design and sound – but it was overlooked in the visual effects category.

Although Nolan, 53, received the Britannia award from Bafta in 2010 and has been nominated eight times for previous films including Dunkirk and Inception, he is yet to win either a Bafta or an Oscar. This year’s Academy Award shortlists are announced next Tuesday; to date Nolan has five nominations.

Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos’s steampunk fantasy, came in second place on Thursday with 11 nominations, including nods for best film and adapted screenplay and for Emma Stone’s leading performance, although her co-stars Mark Ruffalo and Willem Dafoe were not mentioned.

Stone will compete against Margot Robbie, Carey Mulligan, Sandra Huller, Fantasia Barrino and Rye Lane’s Vivian Oparah – but not Past Lives’s Greta Lee, nor Killers of the Flower Moon’s Lily Gladstone, who had been considered Stone’s key competition, having taken the Golden Globe for best female actor in a drama earlier this month.

“It’s a very competitive year,” Bafta chair Sara Putt told the Guardian of the omission. “Who would we take off this list?”

While Greta Gerwig’s DayGlo satire eventually triumphed over Oppenheimer at the box office, taking $1.4bn and breaking multiple records, Nolan’s film looks likely to enter the billion-dollar club imminently off the back of awards season rereleases

Along with Robbie’s acting nomination, Barbie is up for original screenplay, supporting actor for Ryan Gosling, costume design and production design; a considerable decline from the 15 mentions it took when the Bafta longlists were announced a fortnight ago.

Earlier this week, culture secretary Lucy Frazer praised the production, which was largely shot in Leavesden Studios, saying “before it was exported to all corners of the world and became the biggest selling film of 2023, Barbie was made and recorded in Hertfordshire – not Hollywood.”

Warner Bros, the studio behind the film, have said that Barbie contributed £80m in direct spend to the local economy, created 685 jobs, involved more than 6,000 extras, supported 754 local businesses and paid over £40m in local wages.”

Neither Gerwig nor Past Lives’s Celine Song nor Saltburn’s Emerald Fennell feature on the shortlist of directors, with Anatomy of a Fall’s Justine Trier the only woman in contention. Alongside her and Nolan are Jonathan Glazer for The Zone of Interest, Andrew Haigh for All of Us Strangers, Bradley Cooper for Maestro and Alexander Payne for The Holdovers. Four of these are first time nominees, none have previously won – and none are Martin Scorsese, another surprise omission from the list.

Last year, only one woman was among the director nominees, down from three in 2022 and four in 2021 – the first year after Bafta introduced radical backstage changes to try to improve inclusivity in the wake of the #BaftasSoWhite backlash of 2020, when none of the performers nominated were people of colour.

“We know it’s not a level playing field,” Putt told the Guardian of the lack of female representation on the best director shortlist. “The odds are stacked. Of the 100 top-grossing films released last year, only 12 were made by women.”

Putt said that while the Bafta longlists are designed to be interventionist – the director category has to have gender parity – the organisation was “not about quotas”.

She added that the bigger picture appeared “a little more hopeful”, with 11 of the 32 total director nominations – including short films and documentaries – going to women. “But there’s still a long way to go.”

Overall, however, the best film nominees – Anatomy of a Fall, The Holdovers, Killers of the Flower Moon, Oppenheimer and Poor Things – represent some vindication for those who have championed auteurist cinema in the face of superhero pressure.

All five – even those bankrolled by major studios – are defiantly the work of individual artists, rather than a creative conglomerate. Poor Things, released in the UK last week, is a full-frontal feminist phantasmagoria, while The Holdovers, out this Friday, harks back to the golden age of early 70s US indie moviemaking.