Barbie at the BAFTAS!

TV expert Ian MacEwan asks, will Barbenheimer' reign supreme in this year's awards season?

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The red carpet will be rolled out for the prestigious BAFTA Film Awards on Sunday 18 February at London’s Royal Festival Hall, in a ceremony hosted by David Tennant and shown live on BBC1. But who will be tickled pink, and who will bomb? Here, we cast an eye over some of the contenders for this year’s film awards season…

Barbie

Historically, film comedies don’t fare well in terms of awards, but 2023 was the year the world turned pink thanks to the irresistible feminist fable from Lady Bird and Little Women director Greta Gerwig. Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling and America Ferrera could be in the mix in the acting categories, but face stiff competition. However Gerwig and her film-director husband Noah Baumbach may share best original script gongs, and the creatives behind the wildly popular film’s costumes and songs may not go home empty-handed either.

Oppenheimer

With its three-hour-plus running time and mix of colour and black-and-white cinematography, Christopher Nolan’s biopic of J Robert Oppenheimer, ‘father of the atomic bomb’, could not be more different from Barbie, the film it opened against at the box office.