The possible winners and record breakers in this year’s nominations

Hollywood has had another eventful year: Deadpool faced off with Wolverine, Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni sued each other, Inside Out 2 conquered the box office and Joker’s sequel emphatically did not.

The Oscars race, meanwhile, played out against the grim backdrop of wildfires which devastated Los Angeles and left thousands of homes destroyed.

Awards season had its fair share of scandal. While The Brutalist’s use of AI and Anora’s lack of an intimacy co-ordinator were storms in a teacup, there was one genuine controversy when some historic tweets nearly brought down Emilia Pérez.

Ahead of the Academy Awards on Sunday (2 March), here are 17 of the quirks, trends, patterns, and record breakers from this year’s batch of nominees.

1. This is the first time two musicals have been nominated for best picture in more than five decades.

Wicked and Emilia Pérez are the first tuneful twosome to be up for the top prize since Funny Girl and Oliver! in 1969.

The musical resurgence is partly down to it being twice as easy to score a best picture nomination nowadays, after the top category was expanded to 10 slots.

2. Adrien Brody already holds one Oscars record, and he could break another.

The US star is currently the youngest ever winner of best actor – he was 29 when he won for his performance in 2002’s The Pianist.

But Brody wasn’t nominated again until this year, with his nod for The Brutalist. If he wins again, he will become the first person to win the leading actor category with his first two nominations.

Only seven other actors currently have a 100% win rate at the Oscars from two or more nominations – Vivien Leigh, Hilary Swank, Kevin Spacey, Luise Rainer, Christoph Waltz, Helen Hayes and Mahershala Ali.

3. But Timothée Chalamet is a major threat.

The Dune and Wonka star is Brody’s toughest competition in best actor, thanks to his acclaimed portrayal of Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown.

If he won, not only would Chalamet halt Brody’s winning streak, he would also take Brody’s record as the youngest-ever winner. There isn’t much in it – Chalamet would be just 10 months younger than Brody was when he won.

4. Netflix’s Emilia Pérez could follow a dubious pattern for streaming films.

It might have the most nominations, but the Spanish-language musical could share the same fate as other recent streaming films which were heavily nominated, but failed to follow through with many wins.

• The Irishman (Netflix) won zero Oscars, from 10 nominations
• Mank (Netflix) won two out of 10
• The Power of the Dog (Netflix) won one out of 12
• Killers of the Flower Moon (Apple) won zero out of 10

Emilia Pérez is strong in a couple of categories, but it’s similarly unlikely to sweep the board.

Only one streaming film has ever won best picture – Apple’s Coda – which only had three nominations overall.

5. Two Succession stars share a disadvantage.

Kieran Culkin and Jeremy Strong are both nominated for best supporting actor, for their performances in A Real Pain and The Apprentice respectively.

But the pair are the only two nominees in the category who don’t come from best picture-nominated films.

A Real Pain’s absence in best picture shouldn’t stop frontrunner Culkin from winning. The last person to win the category without a best picture nomination was Christopher Plummer in 2012, for Beginners.

Every actor in the category this year is Oscar-nominated for the first time, except Edward Norton, who has three previous nods.

6. The Substance is the first body horror to be nominated for best picture, and only the seventh horror overall.

The other six were The Exorcist, Get Out, The Silence of the Lambs, Jaws, The Sixth Sense and Black Swan.

The Substance is a strong contender in best make-up and hairstyling, a category where the winner often overlaps with the acting winners. That could work in Demi Moore’s favour in a tight best actress race.

7. Isabella Rossellini is nominated for an eight-minute performance in Conclave, but that isn’t the shortest in Oscars history.

Beatrice Straight won the same category, best supporting actress, for her role in Network, which lasted 5min 02sec.

Dame Judi Dench is only marginally ahead, winning for a performance in Shakespeare in Love which lasted 5min 52sec.

Winners aside, the shortest nominee is thought to be Hermione Baddeley’s performance in 1959’s Room at the Top, lasting 2min 19sec.

On the subject of durations, The Brutalist (3hrs 35mins including an intermission) would be the fourth-longest best picture winner of all time, after Gone With the Wind, Lawrence of Arabia and Ben-Hur.

8. Sing Sing star Colman Domingo is nominated for best actor, just a year after his last nomination in the same category for Rustin.

Quite an achievement, no doubt. But he has some way to go to catch up with Bette Davis and Greer Garson, who both managed five consecutive Oscar nominations in the 1930s and 40s.

Just behind them are Al Pacino, Elizabeth Taylor, Marlon Brando, Thelma Ritter and Jennifer Jones, who each scored four back-to-back nods.

Bradley Cooper, Renée Zellweger, Russell Crowe, Glenn Close, Jane Fonda, Meryl Streep, Jack Nicholson, William Hurt, Richard Burton, Deborah Kerr, Gregory Peck, Ingrid Bergman, Gary Cooper and Spencer Tracy all managed three in a row.

9. All five best actress nominees come from films which are also nominated for best picture.

That might not sound like much, but it’s the first time it’s happened since 1977.

The historic lack of overlap between the two categories has often been attributed to the Academy being less likely to give female-focused films the top prize.

But that trend has shifted in recent years, with films featuring female leads such as Nomadland, Coda and Everything Everywhere All At Once scoring best picture.

10. Before Sebastian Stan’s nomination for The Apprentice, only seven other actors had been Oscar-nominated for playing a US president.

Frank Langella was recognised for his portrayal of Richard Nixon, while Daniel Day-Lewis and Raymond Massey were both nominated for playing Abraham Lincoln.

Sam Rockwell was nominated for playing George W Bush, Alexander Knox for Woodrow Wilson, and James Whitmore for Harry Truman.

Perhaps most notably, Sir Anthony Hopkins has been nominated twice for portraying two different presidents in separate films – once as Nixon and another as John Quincy Adams.

Stan is slightly different in that he portrays Trump in his younger years as a real estate tycoon, rather than during his tenure as president, but we’re still chalking that up as worthy of induction into this exclusive club.

11. Robbie Williams’ biopic Better Man is nominated for best visual effects, but he also has a connection to two other films in the race.

The British singer’s track Swing Supreme features in a pivotal scene of Emilia Pérez, while his former Take That bandmates feature at the beginning of Anora as a remix of Greatest Day plays in a nightclub.

Its prominence in the film led to the remaining members of Take That performing the song at this year’s Bafta Film Awards.

12. Ralph Fiennes could be a good omen for Conclave.

The last two times the British star was nominated for best actor, for Schindler’s List and The English Patient, his film won best picture.

If Conclave wins, Fiennes would set a record for having appeared in the most best picture winners, becoming the only actor with roles in four (the other being The Hurt Locker).

However, Edward Berger’s absence in the best director category significantly weakens Conclave’s chances. Only six films have ever won best picture without a corresponding director nomination.

On the plus side, three of those have been in the last 12 years (Argo, Coda and Green Book), suggesting this is less of an obstacle than it used to be.

Why wasn’t Berger nominated? One possible factor is that, unlike the five directors who were, he didn’t write or co-write his film’s screenplay. Conclave was adapted from Robert Harris’s novel by British screenwriter Peter Straughan.

13. Diane Warren really wants to win.

The songwriter scored her 16th best original song nomination this year, for writing The Journey, from The Six Triple Eight.

But Warren has never won. With Emilia Pérez’s campaign damaged and potentially splitting votes with two songs in the category, could this finally be her year?

She certainly hopes so. Earlier this month, when a film account on X asked followers: “Which Oscar winner would make you happiest?” Warren brilliantly replied: “Me!”

14. Wicked has a tall hill to climb to win best picture, having missed both a directing and screenplay nomination.

It did score several technical nods as well as acting nominations for Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, but neither are frontrunners in their category.

The last film to win best picture without a corresponding win in a director, screenplay or acting category was Rebecca in 1942.

I’m Still Here star Fernanda Torres is nominated for best actress – after her mother Fernanda Montenegro became the first Brazilian nominee in the same category in 1999 for Central Station.

Meanwhile, Conclave star Isabella Rossellini’s mother Ingrid Bergman was nominated five times in her career, winning twice.

16. Anora’s director could become the first person to win four Oscars for the same film.

As Sean Baker was involved in so many aspects of the film’s production, he could personally win best picture, editing, director and screenplay.

Nobody has ever done this before.

Walt Disney did win four Oscars in the same night in 1953, but for four different films.

And Parasite’s Bong Joon-Ho came incredibly close in 2020, but as the best international film prize technically goes to the country that submitted it rather than the director, he only took home three for his own trophy cabinet.

If Anora does win the top prize, it will be the second consecutive year the director of best picture co-wins with his wife. Baker and wife Samantha Quan would follow Oppenheimer’s Christopher Nolan and Emma Thomas.

Anora would also be the first 18-rated film to win best picture since The Departed in 2007.

17. It’s official: The cat in Flow is named Flow.

The delightful film about a cat who survives a flood is a dark horse in the animated film category, having beaten box office juggernauts Inside Out 2 and The Wild Robot to the prize at the Golden Globes.

“While we worked on Flow the cat didn’t have a name,” the film’s director Gints Zilbalodis said earlier this month. “We just called it the cat.

“I’ve heard from multiple people that they think that its name is Flow. People have even named their cats Flow now! So I think we can call the cat Flow.”