BAFTAs 2024: Cillian Murphy To Sandra Hüller, Final Predictions For Winners In Top Categories

The 77th BAFTA Awards will take place on Sunday night at the Royal Festival Hall in London. The event will be hosted by one of Britain’s most liked actors David Tennant, who made a heartwarming return to the Doctor Who franchise late last year for the 60th anniversary celebrations.

Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer has the most nominations of any film this year and is expected to sweep the awards.

Here are our predictions for the key categories:

Supporting Actor

This is probably the easiest prediction of the evening – Robert Downey Jr. has won literally every award of the season for his turn as Lewis Strauss in Oppenheimer. Paul Mescal could be a dark horse here for All of Us Strangers, a much-loved but surprisingly under-recognized movie this year, but it’s unlikely. Mescal is still young and literally at the beginning of his career; he will almost certainly be back in the conversation multiple times in the future. Downey Jr, who last won Leading Actor for Chaplin, is unlikely to have many more chances, and we can all look forward to a charming and funny speech.

Supporting Actress

This is the only major category in which an upset is likely. Da’vine Joy Randolph has blazed through most of the pre-cursor awards for her outstanding work in Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers. But it would be a mistake to write off Emily Blunt, who did the most she could with an unsurprisingly underwritten role as Oppenheimer’s wife. Blunt has won none of the awards so far, but she has been a loyal and vocal cheerleader for Oppenheimer and Nolan throughout the campaign season. Most importantly, Blunt is British, and that goes a long way with BAFTA voters. This is one of the earlier awards of the night, and a win for Blunt here could signal a complete sweep for Oppenheimer.

Leading Actor

The presumptive frontrunners throughout this awards season have been Cillian Murphy for Oppenheimer and Paul Giamatti for The Holdovers. While both performances are superlative in their own right, the edge here goes to Cillian Murphy thanks to his British origin. The BAFTAs have a mandate to promote British art and artists, and there’s no doubt that voters will want to recognise Murphy, not just for this role, but for the stellar body of work he has produced for nearly three decades across both film and television.

Leading Actress

What looked like a two-horse race this year between Emma Stone for Poor Things and Lily Gladstone for Killers of the Flower Moon has turned out to be far more interesting. First the BAFTAs zagged and chose not to nominate Gladstone, leaving the field wide open for previous winner Stone. But the last month has seen a sudden surge in support for German actress Sandra Hüller in Anatomy of a Fall. While Stone’s is the more showy and conventionally daring role, it is Hüller who brings Anatomy of a Fall’s intellectual exercise to life. My money is on Hüller here, given that British voters have historically shown a higher affinity for European movies and artists compared to the Oscars.

Best Film and Best Director

The Oppenheimer train will go all the way with both the big awards. Christopher Nolan is following the Spielberg route – for all the blockbuster success and fan acclaim, it eventually took a ‘serious’ film like Schindler’s List for Spielberg to finally get awards recognition. Nolan has gone a step further and turned even his serious film into a gigantic box office success. For their part, the BAFTAs will not miss a chance to celebrate a British filmmaker.

Impact on the Oscars

The BAFTAs are key predictors of the Academy Awards, not just because it’s one of the biggest pre-cursor awards, but because of the huge overlap in the voting membership between both the academies. In 2023, German-language All Quiet on the Western Front came out of nowhere to dominate the BAFTAs and went on to win four Oscars off of nine nominations. This year, the Oppenheimer narrative seems set in stone, but any kind of upset at the BAFTAs could spell trouble for Nolan next month.