It’s Ryan Coogler’s world, the rest of us are just living in it. His supernatural thriller Sinners has smashed the record held by All About Eve, Titanic and La La Land for the most nominations, racking up 16 in total, two more than the previous record of 14.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s film One Battle After Another picked up a highly creditable 13 nominations and remains a key frontrunner for best picture on the night.
Marty Supreme, Sentimental Value and Frankenstein got nine nominations each, while, as previously noted, Hamnet received eight.
It wasn’t a home run – there will be disappointment that Paul Mescal didn’t get his nomination – but this was a great set of nominations for Ireland, topped by Jessie Buckley’s mention in the best actress category. She will be the one to beat in March.
Hamnet picked up eight nominations overall, including one for Maggie O’Farrell, alongside director Chloé Zhao, for adapted screenplay.
Irishman Richard Baneham, part of the visual effects team behind Avatar: Fire and Ash, picked up a nomination, which was also expected. He’s already a two-time Oscar winner.
John Kelly and Andrew Freedman were nominated for Retirement Plan in the animated short film category. The film was commissioned by Screen Ireland and RTÉ and features the vocal talents of Domhnall Gleeson.
Jesse Plemons was tipped to be nominated for best actor for Bugonia, made by Ireland’s Element Pictures. He lost out, but star Emma Stone made the best actress cut, while Element’s Ed Guiney and Andrew Lowe were nominated as Bugonia made the best picture list.
Ten films have been nominated for best picture:
Best picture
- Bugonia
- F1
- Frankenstein
- Hamnet
- Marty Supreme
- One Battle After Another
- The Secret Agent
- Sentimental Value
- Sinners
- Train Dreams
Actor in a leading role
- Timothée Chalamet, Marty Supreme
- Leonardo DiCaprio, One Battle After Another
- Ethan Hawke, Blue Moon
- Michael B Jordan, Sinners
- Wagner Moura, The Secret Agent
Actress in a leading role
- Jessie Buckley, Hamnet
- Rose Byrne, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
- Kate Hudson, Song Sung Blue
- Renate Reinsve, Sentimental Value
- Emma Stone, Bugonia
Director
- Paul Thomas Anderson, One Battle After Another
- Ryan Coogler, Sinners
- Josh Safdie, Marty Supreme
- Chloé Zhao, Hamnet
- Joachim Trier, Sentimental Value
Documentary feature
- The Alabama Solution
- Come See Me In the Good Light
- Cutting Through Rocks
- Mr Nobody Against Putin
- The Perfect Neighbor
Music (original song)
- Dear Me, from Diane Warren: Relentless
- Golden, from KPop Demon Hunters
- I Lied to You, from Sinners
- Sweet Dreams of Joy from Viva Verdi!
- Train Dreams, from Train Dreams
International feature
- It Was Just an Accident, France
- Sirat, Spain
- The Secret Agent, Brazil
- Sentimental Value, Norway
- The Voice of Hind Rajab, Tunisia
Actor in a supporting role
- Benicio Del Toro, One Battle After Another
- Jacob Elordi, Frankenstein
- Delroy Lindo, Sinners
- Sean Penn, One Battle After Another
- Stellan Skarsgard, Sentimental Value
This sadly means Paul Mescal has missed out on a nomination this year.
Actress in a supporting role
- Elle Fanning, Sentimental Value
- Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, Sentimental Value
- Amy Madigan, Weapons
- Wunmi Mosaku, Sinners
- Teyana Taylor, One Battle After Another
Adapted screenplay
- Bugonia, Will Tracy
- Frankenstein, Guillermo Del Toro
- Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell and Chloé Zhao
- One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson
- Train Dreams, Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar
Original screenplay
- Blue Moon, Robert Kaplow
- It Was Just an Accident, Jafar Panahi and script collaborators
- Marty Supreme, Ronald Bronstein and Josh Safdie
- Sentimental Value, Joachim Trier and Eskil Vogt
- Sinners, Ryan Coogler
And we’re off. Actors Danielle Brooks and Lewis Pullman are here to announce this year’s nominations live from the Academy’s Samuel Goldwyn Theatre.
I’ll be posting the main categories here as they are revealed, then mopping up the best of the rest, plus we’ll have the usual analysis from our chief film correspondent Donald Clarke soon afterwards.
Insert your own popcorn emoji here!
The countdown to the 1.30pm nominations reveal is on, and the most important questions of all remain.
Which Hollywood actors will pretend to have slept through the announcement? Who will have the pronunciation of their names butchered right at their moment of career glory?
And which distraught hopefuls will be on the phone to their agents demanding to know what went wrong?
Find out soon.
Speaking of Buckley, Anne Lucey is in Killarney for The Irish Times. She reports on a proud moment for the town:
Excitement is building in a bright but cold Killarney this morning amid widespread anticipation that Jessie Buckley will be nominated for an Oscar.
At the Arbutus – the Buckley family hotel established in 1926 by her great-grandparents – aunt Carol Dempsey and her husband Sean Buckley (Jessie’s godfather) speak of their exhilaration.
“It’s most extraordinary,” he says, while Dempsey describes the star as someone who has always been “wonderful, a hard worker and very focused”.
“Everyone is rooting for Jessie,” adds Marie Moloney of the Killarney Musical Society, which saw Buckley take to the stage from a young age.
As for the actual Oscars, they will take place at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles on March 15th, or in the early hours of March 16th in this time zone. They will be hosted for the second consecutive year by Conan O’Brien.
This year there’s a new award for casting, with the gong designed to recognise the underappreciated art of matching the right actors to the right roles. Then, from 2028, which marks the centenary of the first ever Oscars, an award for best stunt design will join the line-up.
But the Oscars are poised to undergo much more dramatic change from 2029. This is when Disney-owned ABC, which has done the live telecast in the US every year since 1976, will lose its rights to YouTube.
The video platform will stream the awards live worldwide from 2029 after striking a deal with the Academy late last year. The financial terms of this coup were not disclosed, but given YouTube is owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, we can assume that money was no object.
RTÉ showed the ceremony live (from midnight, Irish time) in 2025, so let’s hope it still has enough money to fork out for the rights to this year’s festival of Jessie.
Never mind the Irish, what about the rest of the Oscars?
The films that pick up the most nominations aren’t always the ones that do the best on the night, and sometimes it can feel a bit deflating and beside-the-point when the headlines focus on the totals.
Still, this year could be a genuinely interesting one for nomination tallies – for awards nerds, at least – as One Battle After Another or Sinners or perhaps both could break the record for the most nods received by a single film.
That record stands at 14 and was set before the 1951 awards by All About Eve before being equalled by Titanic in 1998 and by La La Land before 2017’s infamous envelope-gate ceremony.
(Titanic also shares the record for the most wins, at 11, with Ben-Hur and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.)
Other points of interest include how awards-season heavyweights Marty Supreme and Sentimental Value will fare, especially in the acting categories. Both films are overflowing with Oscar-worthy performances, though not all of them are guaranteed to be recognised by voters.
Titanic: director James Cameron with Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet during the filming of the 1997 film’s floating-door scene. Photograph: 20th Century Fox
I’m not sure we can still call this the green wave – the same one that crashed on Hollywood in 2023 – but the Irish presence at this year’s Oscars could well stretch across multiple categories.
Maybe this is a new green wave, just with some of the same surfers involved?
Anyway, Ireland is likely to have a runner in the visual effects race, with two-time Oscar winner Richard Baneham, from Tallaght in Dublin, tipped to pick up a third nod for his work on the Avatar films. The animator and visual effects supervisor previously won Academy Awards in 2010 and 2023.
There may also be local interest in the animated short film category, as two Irish titles, Retirement Plan and Éiru, made the shortlist of 15 announced before Christmas.
And then there’s the chance of multiple nominations for Bugonia, which is another collaboration between Dublin-based Element Pictures, Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos and lead actress Emma Stone. If it makes the best picture list, producers Ed Guiney and Andrew Lowe will swell the tally of Irish nods.
The people who love Hamnet really love Hamnet. The Irish Times gave it a five-star review and was not alone in doing so.
Hamnet is not an Irish-produced film, but Maggie O’Farrell, who wrote the novel on which it is based, is originally from Coleraine, Co Derry, and as she co-wrote the screenplay alongside director Chloé Zhao, she could pick up a nomination in the best adapted screenplay category today.
The casting of two Irish actors, Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal, in the main roles of Agnes (or Anne) Shakespeare née Hathaway and William Shakespeare, has also heightened Irish interest in the film.
Incidentally, if Paul Mescal doesn’t make the cut this time, he can at least console himself that he is already Academy Award Nominee Paul Mescal. In 2023 he snuck up from the outside to snatch a best actor nomination for his devastatingly subtle performance in the Charlotte Wells film Aftersun.
Donald Clarke, in his nominations preview, says Andrew Scott has an outside chance of a best supporting actor nod for his quiet but compelling performance as musical-theatre composer Richard Rodgers in Irish coproduction Blue Moon, in which he plays opposite lead actor hopeful Ethan Hawke. I’d certainly be a fan of that happening.
Jessie Buckley is heavy favourite for best actress for her role as the grief-struck Agnes in Hamnet. Photograph: Focus Features
It seems like only yesterday that Jessie Buckley – who could make history as the first Irishwoman to win best actress – was a competitor on BBC talent show I’d Do Anything. In fact it was 18 years ago, in 2008, when she was aged just 17.
The series, presented by Graham Norton, was an elimination contest with the winner cast as Nancy in the 2009 West End revival of Oliver! Buckley, who is from Killarney in Co Kerry, finished as the runner-up, though if memory serves “chief judge” Andrew Lloyd Webber was keen for her to win.
She went on to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (Rada) in London, graduating with a BA in acting in 2013, and soon went from strength to strength on stage and screen.
Buckley is now expected to claim not just a nomination but the actual gong for her role as Agnes in Hamnet, Chloé Zhao’s adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s grief-laced novel. Indeed, Donald Clarke wondered if she might be unbeatable as far back as October.
Here’s a selection of Jessie Buckley reads:
It’s Oscar time: welcome to our coverage of the announcement of the nominations for the 98th Academy Awards. Who will make the Oscars cut this year? Who will be snubbed?
Never mind the surefire nomination, can we just crown Jessie Buckley as best actress winner now? Is her Hamnet co-star Paul Mescal destined to collect his second Oscar nomination, this time in the best supporting actor category?
How many nods will Bugonia, produced by Ireland’s Element Pictures, and the wonderful Blue Moon, made at Ardmore Studios in Bray, manage to pick up?
We’ll find out from 1.30pm, when actors Danielle Brooks and Lewis Pullman will announce the nominations live from the Academy’s Samuel Goldwyn Theatre in Los Angeles.
In the meantime, here are some key reads on the backdrop to this year’s shindig, starting with nomination predictions from our chief film correspondent, Donald Clarke.