‘Oppenheimer’ tops Oscar predictions of ‘The Hollywood Reporter’; no surprises likely

LOS ANGELES — It’s going to be a clean sweep at the Oscars for ‘Oppenheimer’, and the biopic’s director, Christopher Nolan, may finally get his much-overdue Best Director trophy. These are the predictions of ‘The Hollywood Reporter’ awards expert Scott Feinberg and chief film critic David Rooney.

With the 96th Academy Awards, which is the official name of the Oscars, slated to open at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles on Sunday night (U.S. Pacific Time), all the world’s eyes will be on ‘Oppenheimer’, which has become this year’s awards season favourite at the expense of Greta Gerwig’s ‘Barbie’, the other blockbuster film that opened on the same day last year.

The event will be live-streamed on Disney+Hotstar for Indian viewers from 4 a.m. early Monday morning.

The only film of interest to Indians, Indian Canadian director Nisha Pahuja’s ‘To Kill A Tiger’, the story of a father’s fight for justice for his raped 13-year-old daughter in Jharkhand, is not the favourite of punters in the Best Documentary Feature category, unlike last year’s winner, Guneet Monga and Kartiki Gonsalves’s ‘The Elephant Whisperers’.

The favourite in this section is the documentary ‘Bobi Wine: The People’s President’, which is about the superstar singer-turned-challenger to Uganda’s President for 35 years, Yoweri Museveni. Wine put up a tough challenge, despite intimidation by the police and armed forces, in his country’s 2021 presidential election that was marked by irregularities.

Feinberg and Rooney’s other favourites for Oscar wins are:

Best Director: Christopher Nolan, who may finally break his Oscar jinx

Best Actor: Cillian Murphy, ‘Oppenheimer‘

Best Actress: Lily Gladstone, ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ (Martin Scorsese)

Best Supporting Actor: Robert Downey Jr, ‘Oppenheimer’

Best Supporting Actress: Da’Vine Joy Randolph, ‘The Holdovers’

Best Adapted Screenplay: ‘Oppenheimer’ (Christopher Nolan)

Best Original Screenplay: ‘Anatomy of a Fall’ (Justine Triet and Arthur Harari)

Best International Feature: ‘The Zone of Interest’ (Jonathan Glazer)

Best Animated Feature: ‘Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse’

Will the experts of ‘The Hollywood Reporter’ be proven right, or does the Academy have a couple of surprises to pull out from its hat this year to make the Oscars look a tad different from the Golden Globes and the BAFTAs?

We will have to wait for a little more than half a day to find out for ourselves.