Coogler’s vampire thriller swept the Oscar nominations over Chloé Zhao’s tearjerker and Paul Thomas Anderson’s counterculture thriller. This genre-defying drama about the black experience could now rule awards season
• Full list of nominees
• Sinners becomes first film in history to earn 16 Oscar nominations

Agree with them or not, these Oscar nominations deliver a pert slap to the accepted assumptions of awards season. The industry had been expecting landslides for classy upmarket fare such as Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another and Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, and also for Josh Safdie’s delirious comedy Marty Supreme. And that’s what they got.

But perhaps no one expected these titles to get quite as colossal a smackdown as they got from Ryan Coogler’s vampire drama thriller Sinners: a violent, high-energy fantasia about racism, music and the black experience, which has soared ahead with 16 nominations – the most for any film in 97 years of the Academy Awards. Whatever happens on the night itself, Ryan Coogler has made Oscar history.

Woman who paired Buckley with Paul Mescal in critics’ favourite is contender in new Academy Award category

If you were to compile a list of the most powerful people in the movie business, you might start with the auteurs, the A-list actors or the execs who bankroll Oscar-winning projects.

But among those better-known powerbrokers is another vital cog in the Hollywood machine: the people with the ability to make and grow stars.

Hamnet and H Is for Hawk fuse themes of loss, birds and elemental female emotion. But whose fault is it if you remain dry-eyed?

‘Is it porn or is it art?” A familiar, even dated question where nudity is involved, and (forgive thumbnail) pretty well-resolved– which is to say: we let the tastemakers decide, and it tips the scale towards “art” if one or both protagonists are not that good-looking.

“Is it grief-porn or is it grief-art?” is a more vexed question. Grief-porn, in relation to cinema, would suggest that the film in question is emotionally manipulative, formulaic; grief-art would suggest the film unleashes feelings both universal and true.

This weekend promises a Hollywood showdown with films including Sinners, Marty Supreme and One Battle After Another up for major awards

After a year that was notoriously close to call (did anyone initially see Anora emerging as the ultimate victor?), this awards season feels a little easier to scope out. Paul Thomas Anderson’s idiosyncratic activism caper One Battle After Another has so far dominated, becoming only the fourth film ever to win best film at both the New York and Los Angeles film circles then the National Board of Review and the National Society of Film Critics. But how far can it go?

It leads this weekend’s Golden Globes with nine nominations but the comedy categories also feature Marty Supreme, now riding high at the box office, and its inescapable leading man Timothée Chalamet. Then on the drama side we have Sinners and Hamnet, two very different films solidifying two very different awards narratives. Here’s how I think it might all play out on Sunday:

Big names from Leonardo DiCaprio to Timothée Chalamet are aiming for a win at Hollywood’s most important Oscars precursor

Hollywood’s A-list will assemble this weekend for the 83rd Golden Globes ceremony, a night that will reveal where this year’s Oscars race is headed.

Stars including Leonardo DiCaprio, Timothée Chalamet, Jennifer Lawrence, Emma Stone, Michael B Jordan and Ariana Grande are among those nominated for film awards while small-screen nominees include Helen Mirren, Jenna Ortega, Jude Law and Glen Powell.

Chloé Zhao’s film version of Maggie O’Farrell’s myth-making novel powerfully reimagines the agonising loss of a child as the source of Hamlet’s grand stage drama

‘The joys of parents are secret, and so are their griefs and fears …” This is Francis Bacon’s essay Of Parents and Children; maybe they were more secret in his day than ours. This kind of secrecy and revelation is part of Chloé Zhao’s deeply felt romantic fantasy about the origin of William Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet. It locates the play’s beginning in the imagined anguish of Shakespeare and his wife Agnes (or Anne) Hathaway at the death of their son Hamnet at the age of 11 in 1596, a few years before the play’s first performance.

The nearness of the names is not supposed to be some monumental Freudian slip; there is linguistic evidence that the two could be used interchangeably. The movie is inspired by Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel of the same name – Zhao co-wrote the screenplay with O’Farrell – as well as the 2004 essay The Death of Hamnet and the Making of Hamlet by literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt. This film succeeds, not because it solves the mystery, but because it deepens it still further. It is contrived and speculative, but ingenious and impassioned at the same time.

From Sinners to F1 to Highest 2 Lowest, Guardian writers pick the scenes that stuck with them the most this year

Spoilers ahead

Disclosure: I covered auto racing for years and still follow Formula One skeptically. I definitely went into F1: The Movie knowing what I was in for, an answer to the hypothetical: what if the bougiest sport on God’s green earth was turned into a western? But you can’t help going along for the ride once Brad Pitt starts filling the frame with his blue-eyed winks, wry smiles and Butch Cassidy swagger. I should’ve been more indignant about this martinet sport making a literal hero out of the biggest rogue on the grid. But I left disbelief in parc fermé as Pitt’s Sonny Hayes bumped and nicked his way to the season finale at Abu Dhabi to much consternation before his wingman (Damson Idris) takes up the ticky tactics at Yas Marina circuit and winds up sacrificing himself and producer Lewis Hamilton (not again!) to help Sonny win his first race and thwart a hostile takeover of their fragile team. And when the lights went up at my desolate midday screening, it was just me still on the edge of my seat and my disbelief still firmly off track. Andrew Lawrence

Paul Thomas Anderson’s counter-culture thriller scores nine nods, ahead of Hamnet and Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, with Leonardo DiCaprio in contention for actor of the year

One Battle After Another, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, has consolidated its place as the awards-season leader in emerging with the most nominations from the London Critics’ Circle film awards.

One Battle After Another, a counter-culture thriller loosely based on Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland, picked up nine nominations, including film of the year, director and screenwriter of the year for Anderson, and actor of the year for DiCaprio. Co-stars Teyana Taylor, Benicio del Toro and Sean Penn were nominated in the supporting categories while Chase Infiniti was nominated for breakthrough performer.