Few UK nominations this year as industry tries to balance attracting global attention and celebrating homegrown projects

It may be billed as Britain’s premier film awards, but when nominations for the Baftas were announced last month, the lack of British representation in the top categories was hard to ignore. Just one British actor, Robert Aramayo, appeared in the leading actor category, while there were no British nominees at all for leading actress (the UK-based Irish actor Jessie Buckley notwithstanding).

Peter Mullan was the only Briton in the supporting actor category, while representation for best supporting actress fared better, with Emily Watson, Carey Mulligan and Wunmi Mosaku nominated.

Counterculture comedy One Battle After Another wins four awards, including best picture, director, screenplay and supporting actor for Sean Penn

Paul Thomas Anderson’s counterculture comedy One Battle After Another continued its march to Oscars glory at the London Critics’ Circle film awards on Sunday evening, taking four awards, including best picture, director, screenplay and supporting actor for Sean Penn.

In his speech to pick up the screenplay award, Anderson said he wanted to share the award with the Guardian’s Xan Brooks for his review of Brett Ratner’s Melania, which was published on Friday. “It was one of the best pieces of writing,” said Anderson. “Pretty damn good.”

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.

• Ryan Coogler’s ghost story breaks records

• One Battle After Another in second with 13 nods

• Marty Supreme, Sentimental Value and Frankenstein score nine apiece

• Mescal, Clooney, Paltrow and Wicked snubbed

• Full list of nominees

Sinners, Ryan Coogler’s critically and commercially acclaimed supernatural thriller, has become the first film to be nominated for 16 Academy Awards.

The film starring Michael B Jordan as twin brothers setting up a blues club in 1930s Mississippi while battling racism and vampires has so far taken $368m worldwide. It is nominated for trophies including best picture, director, leading actor, supporting actor (for the British actor Delroy Lindo), supporting actress (for British-Nigerian actor Wunmi Mosaku) and the Academy’s inaugural casting prize.

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.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another looks unstoppable ahead of the Oscars, despite Timothée Chalamet’s triumph over Leonardo DiCaprio for best actor

The biggest backlash brewing concerns Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, lauded by critics and embraced – especially in the US – by audiences as one of 2025’s key cultural landmarks. The thriller did win two Globes – for cinematic and box office achievement and original score – but both wound up not really counting. The first is the Globes’s consolation prize (it was won by Barbie in 2023 and Wicked last year); the second wasn’t even broadcast on the telecast. Coogler missing out on screenplay to One Battle After Another was perceived by some as a slap in the face – the Oscars and Baftas separate the category into original and adapted, however, so a corrective could come.

One Battle After Another engages with the tense climate of the second Trump administration unlike any other contender

Now that the political scene in the contemporary United States looks like an unending string of military PR coups for the Trumpian right at home and abroad, it’s appropriate that Paul Thomas Anderson’s spectacular, mysterious counterculture epic One Battle After Another – with Leonardo DiCaprio as a clueless, dishevelled ex-revolutionary – should consolidate its current position as one of the leading movies of this awards season: winning four Globes including best musical or comedy and best director for Paul Thomas Anderson – whose fluency, productivity and pure technique and ambition are arguably making him America’s pre-eminent film-maker. The excellent Teyana Taylor got best supporting actress.

This is a movie scene in which no mainstream is directly attacking the Trump regime head-on (such as, say, Ali Abbasi’s satirical Trump biopic The Apprentice) but there is something in Anderson’s film that inhales and intuits both the current febrile mood of reactionary hysteria and the tension and depression of those opposing it. Sean Penn wasn’t up for any Globes last night for his role as the bullish and yet pathetic Col Lockjaw in One Battle After Another, the oppressor despised by his masters, but I see a great deal of Lockjaw in Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio, the disposable courtiers uneasily standing ramrod straight behind the president at public events.

From talent shows to the big screen, the actor’s performance in Hamnet has made her a leading awards contender

Hamnet, Chloé Zhao’s film adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s bestselling novel about William Shakespeare and his wife, Agnes (or Anne) Hathaway, is a tender meditation on love and grief. Charting the couple’s anguish over the death of their 11-year-old son – said to have inspired the play Hamlet – it has moved audiences to tears and united critics in their praise.

The film’s emotional force is carried by the Irish actor and singer Jessie Buckley, who portrays Hathaway (opposite Paul Mescal’s Shakespeare) with a rawness and intimacy that has already earned her a Critics’ Circle award for best actress, and marked her out as a leading contender for the Golden Globes, Baftas and Oscars. The Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw called her “unselfconsciously beguiling”, while Rolling Stone predicted audiences “will be talking about Jessie Buckley’s performance for years”.

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.

The Marty Supreme and Hamnet stars are jockeying for pole position for the big Hollywood prize after a night in which One Battle After Another and Adolescence were also recognised

Timothée Chalamet and Jessie Buckley have surged into serious contention for the Oscars for their roles in, respectively, Marty Supreme and Hamnet, after picking up the top prizes for acting at the Critics Choice awards on Sunday.

Chalamet, who has been on a highly visible promotional tour for the film, defeated Oscar favourite Leonardo DiCaprio (One Battle After Another) in the best actor race, as well as Michael B Jordan (Sinners) and Ethan Hawke (Blue Moon). Chalamet, who plays a wannabe table-tennis champ in the early 1950s in Marty Supreme, thanked Kylie Jenner in his acceptance speech, saying: “Thank you to my partner for three years … I love you. I couldn’t do this without you. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.”

Margot Robbie busts her corset in Wuthering Heights, the Devil Wears Prada sequel goes fashionably to war, and Christopher Nolan brings us a Greek epic. Plus much more in our pick of the best films coming to UK cinemas this year

• More from the 2026 culture preview

Jessie Buckley may need to hire a carpenter for the silverware-cabinet she is expected to need for her hugely admired performance in the film based on the Maggie O’Farrell novel. She plays Anne (or Agnes) Hathaway, wife of William Shakespeare, grieving the terrible loss of their 11-year-old son, Hamnet, in 1596, which the story imagines to be a spur to the creation of Shakespeare’s play Hamlet. Paul Mescal plays Shakespeare and Emily Watson his mother, Mary.
• 9 January.

Sinners, Hamnet and Sentimental Value also key contenders for first major awards ceremony of the season, while Bradley Cooper, Sydney Sweeney and Brendan Fraser among those snubbed
• Full list of nominations
• Peter Bradshaw’s take
• The best films of 2025

At present, the mantelpiece of Paul Thomas Anderson remains strikingly light on major trophies. Despite being responsible for some of the films widely acknowledged to be the best of the century so far, including There Will Be Blood, The Master and Phantom Thread, the writer-director is yet to win an Oscar, Golden Globe or more than one Bafta (original screenplay for 2021’s Licorice Pizza).

This year’s Golden Globe nominations suggest this is about to change, with his counterculture epic One Battle After Another leading the pack of nominees with nine mentions on the shortlist, including for best comedy or musical, best director, best original screenplay, leading actor for Leonardo DiCaprio, leading actor for Chase Infiniti, supporting actress for Teyana Taylor and two chances to scoop supporting actor – for Sean Penn and Benicio del Toro. Jonny Greenwood’s score was also recognised.