2024 Oscar Nominations: ‘Oppenheimer’ Leads the Way With 13 Nominations


The nominees for the 96th Academy Awards were announced Tuesday morning and last summer’s “Barbenheimer” phenomenon proved to be a dominant duo once again, with “Oppenheimer” leading the way with 13 nominations and “Barbie” collecting eight. A handful of major awards contenders are still exclusively in theaters, most notably “American Fiction,” “Poor Things” and “The Zone of Interest,” which are all best picture nominees. But the vast majority of titles are currently available to stream or rent on various platforms. Here’s a complete rundown of where to find all the major awards hopefuls.

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‘Oppenheimer’ | Anatomy of a Scene

The writer and director Christopher Nolan narrates the opening sequence from the film.

Hi, I’m Christopher Nolan director, writer, and co-producer of “Oppenheimer.” Opening with the raindrops on the water came late to myself and Jen Lane in the edit suite. But ultimately, it became a motif that runs the whole way through the film. Became very important. These opening images of the detonation at Trinity are based on the real footage. Andrew Jackson, our visual effects supervisor, put them together using analog methods to try and reproduce the incredible frame rates that their technology allowed at the time, superior to what we have today. Adapting Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s book “American Prometheus,” I fully embraced the Prometheun theme, but ultimately chose to change the title to “Oppenheimer” to give a more direct idea of what the film was going to be about and whose point of view we’re seeing. And here we have Cillian Murphy with an IMAX camera inches from his nose. Hoyte van Hoytema was incredible. IMAX camera revealing everything. And I think, to some degree, applying the pressure to Cillian as Oppenheimer that this hearing was applying. “Yes, your honor.” “We’re not judges, Doctor.” “Oh.” And behind him, out of focus, the great Emily Blunt who’s going to become so important to the film as Kitty Oppenheimer, who gradually comes more into focus over the course of the first reel. We divided the two timelines into fission and fusion, the two different approaches to releasing nuclear energy in this devastating form to try and suggest to the audience the two different timelines. And then embraced black-and-white shooting here. Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss being shot on IMAX black-and-white film. The first time anyone’s ever shot that film. Made especially for us. And he’s here talking to Alden Ehrenreich who is absolutely indicative of the incredible ensemble that our casting director John Papsidera put together. Robert Downey Jr. utterly transformed, I think, not just in terms of appearance, but also in terms of approach to character, stripping away years of very well-developed charisma to just try and inhabit the skin of a somewhat awkward, sometimes venal, but also charismatic individual, and losing himself in this utterly. And then as we come up to this door, we go into the Senate hearing rooms. And we try to give that as much visibility, grandeur, and glamour to contrast with the security hearing that’s so claustrophobic. And takes Oppenheimer completely out of the limelight. [CROWD SHOUTING]

The writer and director Christopher Nolan narrates the opening sequence from the film.CreditCredit…Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures, via Associated Press

Nominated for: Best picture, director, actor, supporting actor, supporting actress, adapted screenplay, production design, costume design, cinematography, editing, makeup and hairstyling, sound, original score.

How to watch: Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.

Conjuring the dark wizardry of the Manhattan Project, the director Christopher Nolan turned the Trinity test into a seat-rumbling summer spectacle, placing it at the center of “Oppenheimer” like the nuclear core of 20th-century history. But there’s a disturbing intimacy to the film as well, with Cillian Murphy’s tremulous J. Robert Oppenheimer leading an unstable band of scientists while nearly drowning in uncharted political and ethical waters. In exploring the origins of a technological boogeyman that continues to haunt mankind, Nolan embraces the contradictions of the flawed, brilliant man whose spirit seems to embody it.

‘Barbie’

Nominated for: Best picture, supporting actor, supporting actress, adapted screenplay, production design, costume design, original song (two nominees).

How to watch: Stream it on Max. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.

Perhaps “Barbie” was destined to become the year’s biggest box-office phenomenon, but Greta Gerwig had to thread a very thin needle in creating a pop entertainment of buoyancy and substance. While playing off the fizzy appeal of the fashionable plastic doll that has lined toy shelves for over half a century, Gerwig seizes the opportunity to reflect on the distance between Barbie’s vision of womanhood and the troubling messiness of reality. As Gerwig’s bruised idealist, Margot Robbie’s Barbie keeps the tone light as she journeys from the matriarchal paradise of Barbieland to the real world, which isn’t the utopia she might have imagined.

‘Killers of the Flower Moon’

Nominated for: Best picture, director, actress, supporting actor, production design, costume design, cinematography, editing, original score, original song.

How to watch: Stream it on Apple TV+. Buy it on Amazon, Vudu, Google Play and YouTube.

The nativist skirmishes and corruption that have defined so many of Martin Scorsese’s gangster (and non-gangster) dramas surface again in this sprawling epic of American greed and violence, based on David Grann’s historical nonfiction book. Set in the oil-rich Osage territory of 1920s Oklahoma, “Killers of the Flower Moon” looks into a murderous conspiracy to wrest claim rights away from the native population. At the film’s center is the toxic love story between an Osage woman (Lily Gladstone) and an impressionable war veteran (Leonardo DiCaprio) whose affection for her is clouded by his relationship to his scheming uncle (Robert De Niro) and a taste for the finer things.

‘The Holdovers’

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‘The Holdovers’ | Anatomy of a Scene

Alexander Payne narrates a sequence from his film featuring Paul Giamatti and Dominic Sessa.

“Hi, I’m Alexander Payne. I directed ‘The Holdovers.’” I thought Barton Men don’t lie. Don’t get me wrong, that was fun. But you just lied through your teeth. “The story is basically about a bunch of students at an all-boys prep school in New England who have nowhere to go for the holidays. And eventually, the story boils down to the relationship between the very curmudgeonly teacher selected to stay behind with the boys this year, Paul Giamatti and one student in particular, played by Dominic Sessa, a new actor.” There was an incident when I was at Harvard with my roommate. And? He accused me of copying from his senior thesis. Plagiarizing. Well, did you? No! He stole from me. “A cook is only as good as his or her ingredients, and having Paul Giamatti and Dominic Sessa, both are capable of learning and performing pages of dialogue at a crack.” So you got kicked out of Harvard for cheating? No, I got kicked out of Harvard for hitting him. You hit him? What, like, punched him out? Nope I hit him with a car. “It’s about three or four pages of dialogue, and I wanted to do it in one go and choreograph it to the camera.” “At first, you’re fooled into thinking that only these two characters are alone at the liquor store. But suddenly you’re surprised at the end of the scene by the appearance of the liquor store salesman.” There you go, killer. “And he was played by a guy named Joe Howell who actually works at that liquor store.”

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Alexander Payne narrates a sequence from his film featuring Paul Giamatti and Dominic Sessa.CreditCredit…Seacia Pavao/Focus Features

Nominated for: Best picture, actor, supporting actress, original screenplay, editing.

How to watch: Stream it on Peacock. Buy it on Apple TV, Google Play, YouTube, Vudu and Amazon.

Reuniting for the first time since “Sideways” nearly 20 years ago, the director Alexander Payne and his lovably cantankerous star, Paul Giamatti, have made a film (destined to become a future holiday staple) about the relationship between three people left to themselves over Christmas in 1970. Giamatti stars as the least-liked teacher at an elite New England boarding school, assigned to babysit the small handful of students whose parents didn’t pick them up for the break. After a good deal of friction, he starts to forge a warmer relationship with one troubled student (Dominic Sessa) and the school’s head cook (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), who’s facing her first Christmas since losing her son in Vietnam.

‘Maestro’

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‘Maestro’ | Anatomy of a Scene

The director Bradley Cooper narrates a sequence from the film in which he stars alongside Carey Mulligan.

Hi I’m Bradley Cooper. I co-wrote and directed ‘Maestro.’ It was very important to me, at the onset of this scene, that she be in a position of power. So, her on the windowsill, the light haloing her behind, waiting for whoever was gonna come in to be scolded. And then he’s sort of like a dog who knows that he’s done something bad, comes in, stays right on that side of the frame, almost out of the scene, and then slowly comes over, and then parks himself back in that position, almost trying to get out of the frame. And then I wanted sort of for you to be hearing this celebratory Thanksgiving Day parade going on, and seeing these floats go by, to sort of play into the juxtaposition between this sort of horrific scene happening and this joyous occasion outside, and for it also to be kind of comedic, in a way, and ridiculous. This was a scene that I wrote many years ago, when I first started to work on this project, and it maintained its integrity all the way ‘till we started shooting five and a half years later. “You’re letting your sadness get the better —” “Oh, stop it!” “Let me at least finish!” “This has nothing to do with me!” “Let me finish what I’m going to say!” “No! No!” “I think you’re letting your sadness get the better of you.” “This has nothing to do with me! It’s about you, so you should love it!” So this is the point of the film that everything has come to a boiling point, specifically for Felicia. She’s entered into a marriage eyes wide open in terms of how she perceived it would be, and how her husband, Leonard Bernstein, would behave, and now it’s gotten to a point where it’s encroached so much into her emotional state that she can’t take it anymore. “Hate in your heart! Hate in your heart, and anger for so many things, it’s hard to count. That’s what drives you. Deep, deep anger drives you. You aren’t up on that podium allowing us all to experience the music the way it was intended. You are throwing it in our faces.” “How dare you?” My fear was that we wouldn’t be able to maintain this frame for the entire scene. But because Carey Mulligan is such an assassin actor, it was effortless. We did this three times. This was the third take. And once we got it, that was it. Her main thrust is that he’s got hate in his heart, and he’s not up there on the podium doing anything other than teaching the audience that they’re not as good as him. It was very important to me that the audience, as they watched the film progress after this scene, know that that’s not really what she felt, because there’s no way that Felicia would have fallen in love with a man who has hate in his heart. But when we are trying to hurt somebody that we love, we’ll try to hit them where we think we can hurt them, and on the podium is where he feels, I think, the most free, and the most able to fulfill his potential. To me, when you’re not cutting, it, as a viewer, it should feel unsafe. You don’t know where it’s going. And if you start cutting, it just changes everything. “— zero opportunity to live, or even breathe as our true selves. Your truth makes you brave and strong, and saps the rest of us of any kind of bravery or strength!” But what I loved about it was just, and Matty Libatique is so incredible, the cinematographer, able to execute what I wanted, which was to have her feel almost regal. But she was, Felicia, in that moment. “If you’re not careful, you’re going to die a lonely, old queen.” Mommy, daddy! [CHEERING] Daddy! Snoopy’s here! Hurry up! [KNOCKING ON DOOR] You’re missing Snoopy! What are you guys doing in there? I love when they’re shadowed here by his ego. Outside the window, this Snoopy sort of represents where he is in his life. And then for her to leave him in the middle at the end of the scene, and he’s just there, you know, in the center of the ring, as Snoopy goes by. That was always what I had envisioned. [CHEERING]

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The director Bradley Cooper narrates a sequence from the film in which he stars alongside Carey Mulligan.CreditCredit…Jason McDonald/Netflix

Nominated for: Best picture, actor, actress, original screenplay, cinematography, makeup and hairstyling, sound.

How to watch: Stream it on Netflix.

In his follow-up to “A Star Is Born,” the director/actor Bradley Cooper again turns to the emotionally turbulent life of a musician, casting himself as Leonard Bernstein, the famed American conductor and composer who lived a double life in full. Starting in lustrous black-and-white, “Maestro” depicts the young Bernstein’s intoxicating rise through the New York Philharmonic and his romance with the stage actress Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan) in the 1940s. The film then shifts to color in later decades, as Bernstein’s sexual dalliances and substance abuse take their toll on a marriage that’s under sharp public scrutiny.

‘Anatomy of a Fall’

Nominated for: Best picture, director, actress, original screenplay, editing.

How to watch: Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.

The winner of the Palme d’Or at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, Justine Triet’s penetrating drama sounds like a routine did-she-or-didn’t-she courtroom procedural, as a novelist (Sandra Hüller) stands trial for murdering her husband at their Alpine chalet. Yet the courtroom theatrics open up a deeper investigation into a difficult marriage and the toll it exacts on the couple’s legally blind son (Milo Machado Graner), who discovers the body. Though the woman’s innocence is at stake, Triet is more compelled by the domestic tensions leading up to the death and the fallout from the trial.

‘Past Lives’

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‘Past Lives’ | Anatomy of a Scene

The writer and director Celine Song narrates a sequence from her film, featuring Greta Lee and Teo Yoo.

“Hi, my name is Celine Song, and I’m the writer and director of ‘Past Lives.’” [MUSIC PLAYING] “So the scene is between Hae Sung, who’s played by Teo Yoo, and Nora, who is played by Greta Lee, and it’s about these two characters who haven’t seen each other in person in 24 years. And they’re sort of reuniting in New York. And the focus of the scene is about the way that Hae Sung looks so lost and alone and very small in New York City, in the city that is foreign to him. It’s a city that he’s here as a tourist. And the thing that we’re, of course, trying to capture here, is a kind of sense of anxiety and excitement. It’s some kind of a mix of both of waiting for your old friend that you haven’t seen in a long time. And he doesn’t know what to expect. And we wanted him to look like a kid in the scene. You know, him as he’s touching his hair to fix it, because he just wants to leave a good impression. And we’re really talking about capturing this moment where Nora is going to shout his name and he’s going to turn. And this whole shot was set up for this turn.” [CAR HORNS] “Hae Sung!” “And then we get to actually experience his sort of stunnedness or awe as he is seeing Nora. And the way that I sort of wrote this in the script, is that it’s as though he is seeing a ghost, and she’s also seeing a ghost. They’re sort of seeing a ghost in each other. And not only is this ghost, a real person who’s physical, she’s also walking towards him. And it’s meant to be a little bit terrifying.” [FOOTSTEPS] – [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] “So this is the moment in the past for them where they were childhood sweethearts. And I think for that moment, that viscerally, you’re sort of transported back in time. And Nora here is sort of breaking the barrier between them and crossing over. And the sound design for this is also about New York crashing down on them as she reaches over to hug him.” [TRAFFIC] [CAR HORNS] “There’s very little dialogue in the scene. So, so much of it had to happen through the way that they’re living with this moment and trying to navigate how they feel. And this particular shot is something that me and my DP, Shabier Kirchner, were sort of pulling from a Kore-eda trick, which is what we call the swinging camera. Where here, we’re with Hae Sung, and we’re so happy to see him and we’re excited to experience this through him, but we miss Nora. So, the camera moves so that we can see Nora.” – [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] [MUSIC PLAYING] “And now we’re so happy to see Nora and we’re just happy to experience this moment with her. And, but we’re happy to be here, but we also start to miss Hae Sung, so there’s a little bit of longing that gets built. And then we move over and we see Hae Sung again. And we’re so happy to see Hae Sung. And I think that feeling is really the thing that we were after for what we wanted this to be. Because now we’re going to miss Hae Sung again, and we’re so happy to see Nora. And this is the kind of emotional state that we want to put the audience, of longing and also glad to see someone, which is sort of what the heart of the scene is. And of course, they’re so happy, and we sort of walk them out of the scene.” – [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] – [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] – [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] – [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] [LAUGHS]

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The writer and director Celine Song narrates a sequence from her film, featuring Greta Lee and Teo Yoo.CreditCredit…Jon Pack/A24

Nominated for: Best picture, original screenplay.

How to watch: Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.

In her heart-rending feature debut as a writer-director, the playwright Celine Song offers a what-if romantic scenario that pulls at the identity of a happily married woman in New York, even decades after she and her family moved from South Korea. Once extremely close childhood friends, Nora (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) reconnect as adults on social media, and meet again in America, where they reminisce and inevitably begin to wonder about the path not taken. Comparisons to Richard Linklater’s “Sunrise” trilogy may be inevitable, but the temptation and longing in “Past Lives” is uniquely complicated by the cultural crosswinds that affect Nora, Hae Sung and Nora’s American husband (John Magaro), who waits patiently in the wings.

‘Nyad’

Nominated for: Best actress, supporting actress.

How to watch: Stream it on Netflix.

After directing a series of documentaries about seemingly impossible physical feats, like scaling the 3,000-foot El Capitan rock wall without ropes (“Free Solo”) or pulling off the Thailand cave rescue (“The Rescue”), Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin make a natural transition to features with this biopic about the distance swimmer Diana Nyad. Nyad (Annette Bening) had set several distance records in the 1970s, but the film focuses on her effort to swim from Cuba to Florida at the age of 64, with help from her close friend Bonnie Stoll (Jodie Foster). Vasarhelyi and Chin once again tap into the indomitable spirit of an athlete willing to court death to push the limits.

‘May December’

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‘May December’ | Anatomy of a Scene

The director Todd Haynes narrates a sequence from his film starring Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore.

Hi, I’m Todd Haynes, and I’m the director of ‘May December.’ [DOOR OPENS & CLOSES]: “Now, this is silly.” “This is actually very serious business.” “If you say so.” So in this scene, Natalie Portman, who is playing an actor, Elizabeth Berry, who’s planning to portray the character that Julianne Moore plays, Gracie Atherton-Yoo, in a story about the origins of this scandalous relationship that took place over 20 years ago, where Gracie seduced a 13-year-old boy. And in this scene, she literally is, as actors do, looking at the way Gracie applies makeup, and her makeup choices. And so like many scenes that you will see in the film that take place in rooms with mirrors, the scene is shot with the camera occupying the place of the mirror. “You know, I think that it would be better if I just did this to you.” And so the actors are performing directly into the lens of the camera when they are looking at the reflections of themselves, and they look just off the lens at the reflection of the other actor. What’s really interesting about the scene is, that usually Natalie Portman’s character is in the position of interviewing people and asking questions and trying to collect information to help her in her transformation into portraying this woman. Here, it’s Julianne who starts asking questions about Natalie’s character and Natalie, Elizabeth’s life. “So, did you always want to be an actress?” “Always.” So, you start to hear more about Natalie’s character than we’ve ever heard in this scene. “I wanted to be on Broadway. And when I told my parents, I was nine or 10, they were so disappointed. They said, honey, you’re so much smarter than that.” “What did you say? Are you smarter than that?” “I don’t know. I don’t know.” And there’s an intimacy that starts to emerge between the two of them, and a sense that, wow, are these women going to find a kind of safety in each other rather than a sense of threat, or how far is this going to go? And that’s the sort of atmosphere that the scene conjures I think for the viewer as you’re watching. But in the end, man, as a director of great actresses that I’ve been lucky enough to mark my career by, this was a particular astonishing day to watch these two women. “What was your mother like?” “She was beautiful.” And so a shot like this is a great idea, but it doesn’t work unless you have Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman. And so the silences and the breaks and the little bit of laughter is really what’s happening, and it gives the viewer a lot to chew on. [MUSIC PLAYING]

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The director Todd Haynes narrates a sequence from his film starring Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore.CreditCredit…Francois Duhamel/Netflix

Nominated for: Original screenplay.

How to watch: Stream it on Netflix.

With their prismatic take on a tabloid scandal that echoes the Mary Kay Letourneau case, the director Todd Haynes and the screenwriter, Samy Burch, adopt a serio-comic tone that echoes high art like “Persona” one minute and early 2000s USA Network fodder the next. Natalie Portman stars as a semifamous actress who travels to Savannah, Ga., to study for the role of a Letourneau-like woman (Julianne Moore) who was caught having sex with a seventh-grade boy, but wound up marrying him and having children after a prison stint. The actress’s presence, asking simple questions that the couple has been studiously avoiding, destabilizes their relationship, particularly the much-younger husband (Charles Melton), who starts to reflect on what happened to him.

‘Rustin’

Nominated for: Best actor.

How to watch: Stream it on Netflix.

In championing a less-heralded yet fascinatingly multidimensional figure in the civil rights movement, “Rustin” gains much of its power from Colman Domingo’s electrifying lead performance as Bayard Rustin, a gay activist and socialist who had the ear of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The action leads up to Rustin’s greatest triumph as an organizer, the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech in front of an estimated 250,000 people. But “Rustin” digs into the intense internal divisions within the movement over holding the march as a message to the Democratic front-runner John F. Kennedy. It also explores the depth of Rustin’s personal passion for economic justice.

Other Major Nominees

‘Society of the Snow’

Nominated for: Best international feature. Makeup and hairstyling.

How to watch: Stream it on Netflix.

‘Elemental’

Nominated for: Best animated feature.

How to watch: Stream it on Disney+. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.

‘Nimona’

Nominated for: Best animated feature.

How to watch: Stream it on Netflix.

‘Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse’

Nominated for: Best animated feature.

How to watch: Stream it on Netflix. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.

‘Bobi Wine: The People’s President’

Nominated for: Best documentary feature.

How to watch: Stream it on Disney+.

‘The Eternal Memory’

Nominated for: Best documentary feature.

How to watch: Stream it on Paramount+. Buy it on Google Play, Vudu, YouTube and Apple TV.

‘Four Daughters’

Nominated for: Best documentary feature.

How to watch: Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.

‘20 Days in Mariupol’

Nominated for: Best documentary feature.

How to watch: Rent it on Amazon, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.



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