The champagne can continue to flow freely for the Oppenheimer team. 48 hours after its triumph at the Golden Globes, Christopher Nolan’s film about the creator of the atomic bomb is racing to the top of the Screen Actors Guild Awards (SAG) nominations. These awards awarded by the powerful American actors’ union, which brought Hollywood to a standstill with its strike this summer and fall, are considered a good indicator of Oscar preferences. Indeed, actors constitute the largest voting body in the American Cinema Academy. The ceremony will take place on February 24, two weeks before the Oscars.
Oppenheimer is eligible for four statuettes: Best Actor (Cillian Murphy), Best Supporting Actor (Robert Downey Jr and Emily Blunt, and Best Ensemble, the SAG Awards’ most sought-after prize.) Barbie, another summer box office hit , and a true cultural and commercial phenomenon, is matched and selected in the “best ensemble of actors” and “best stunts” categories. Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling are competing as individuals.
Martin Scorsese’s historical fresco Killers of the Flower Moon gets three chances for statuettes: best ensemble, actress for Lily Gladstone, winner of the Golden Globes for best dramatic actress, supporting role for Robert de Niro. But the omission of Leonardo DiCaprio in the best actor category suggests that the great American fresco is a step behind the “Barbenheimer” phenomenon and is not in a strong position.
Cillian Murphy will therefore find in the best actor category Paul Giamatti, grumpy teacher from Winter Break and winner of the Globes on the comedy side, Bradley Cooper transformed into Leonard Bernstein for Maestro, Jeffrey Wright as a cornered writer in American Fiction and Colman Domingo in the skin of the defender of civil rights Bayard Rustin. Among their sisters, the duel seems to be tightening around Lily Gladstone and Emma Stone as a disciple of Frankenstein in Poor Creatures. With Margot Robbie and Carey Mulligan (Maestro) in ambush. Fifth place is occupied by Annette Bening, extreme swimmer in Netflix’s Unsinkable.
This quinté has sparked a plethora of criticism for its classicism and its refusal to take risks. The list of nominees, published on Wednesday, is notable for its absences. No mentions for Todd Haynes’ black comedy May December, starring Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore. A film perhaps too lax about the actors. Nothing either for the existential poetry of Céline Song in Past Lives, our lives before. And above all zero nominations for Sandra Hüller, the accused of Anatomy of a Fall by Justine Triet. The Palme d’Or stumbles on the road that could lead it to the Oscars. Generally, Oscars and Guild have little variation between them. Sometimes a name differs. But very rarely two. It’s hard to win an Oscar without being nominated by the SAG. The distributor Neon will have to redouble its campaign and hope that the internationalization and rejuvenation of the Academy will work in its favor.
The 30th SAG Awards will be held in Los Angeles on February 24. The gala will be broadcast live for the first time this year on the platform of the global streaming giant Netflix, and should thus benefit from renewed notoriety. The guild also rewards the best of the series. On the small screen side, the final season of Succession garnered five nominations, followed by the culinary series The Bear, the dystopia The Last of Us and the football comedy Ted Lasso, which each received four.
The Hollywood Directors Union (DGA) also announced its nominations Wednesday for the DGA Awards, which will take place on February 10. The same procession of feature films is named Oppenheimer, Barbie, Killers of the Flower Moon, Winter Break and the baroque Poor Creatures.
