So the nominations are finally in for the most coveted awards of the film calendar; as predicted, at the top of the list is Christopher Nolan’s eponymous biopic of the creator of the atom bomb, Oppenheimer, with 13 nominations.

There are two other films in double-figures; 11 for the baroque horror of Poor Things, from Yorgos Lanthimos and Killers of the Flower Moon, with 10, including Martin Scorsese’s tenth as director, making him, at 81, the oldest ever directing nominee. And with his 54th Oscar nomination, the composer John Williams has become the oldest nominee in any category, at the age of 91, for his score for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.

But the big talking point seems to be that the 8 nominations for the highest grossing film of last year, Barbie, include Margot Robbie for Best Picture but not Best Actress, and director Greta Gerwig is recognised only in the adapted screenplay category. Critics might note that box office success does not usually equate to directing or lead acting nominations, taking Avatar: The Way of Water and Avengers: Endgame as two recent examples. And while the 8 nominations for Barbie include 2 for original song, they also include a Best Supporting Actress nod for America Ferrera.

And if critics accuse the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences of shunning Gerwig from the directing category because she’s a woman, look no further than the French director Justine Triet, whose Anatomy of a Fall earned her two Golden Globe awards, earlier this month. She’ll contest the Oscar against Scorsese, Nolan, Greece’s Lanthimos and British director Jonathan Glazer, for his German language The Zone of Interest; collectively, this category recognises directors from France, the UK, the US and Greece, making films in French, English and German, about both men and women. This diversity aside, for the first time, three of the Best Picture nominees have been nominated by women.

And excluding Robbie from the Best Actress list simply means the actors who picked the nominees believed there were five better women leading their casts this year; a former winner Emma Stone for Poor Things, two former nominees, Maestro’s Carey Mulligan and Annette Bening for Nyad, Germany’s Sandra Hüller, for Anatomy of a Fall, who also stars in The Zone of Interest and Killers of the Flower Moon’s Lily Gladstone, the first Native American actress to receive an Oscar nomination – Barbie supporters might find it difficult to argue which of the above were less deserving – in the acting category – than Robbie.

And at the recent Golden Globes, the only award won by Barbie was its inaugural Cinematic and Box Office prize, in recognition of its commercial success.

Another notable absence from the list include Killers of the Flower Moon’s Leonardo Di Caprio, who missed out in a Best Actor race, that includes Bradley Cooper for Maestro, Rustin’s Colman Domingo, Jeffrey Wright for American Fiction and the likely front-runners, Oppenheimer’s Cillian Murphy and Paul Giamatti, for The Holdovers.

Di Caprio’s veteran co-star, Robert De Niro, receives his 8th acting nomination; he first won the supporting actor Oscar 49 years ago for The Godfather Part II. Repeating the success will be tough, because the favourite in the category is Oppenheimer’s Robert Downey Jr, with Barbie’s Ryan Gosling, American Fiction’s Sterling K Brown and Poor Things’ Mark Ruffalo also in the running.

Giamatti’s Holdovers co-star Da’Vine Joy Randolph will go into the Best Supporting Actress contest as the front-runner, but she’ll face tough competition from Oppenheimer’s Emily Blunt, The Color Purple’s Danielle Brooks, Barbie’s America Ferrera and former winner Jodie Foster, for Nyad.

The days of the #OscarsSoWhite controversy seem to be put far behind the Academy; of the 20 acting nominees, 5 are black, 1 is Hispanic and for the first time, there’s a Native American Oscar contender.

Another point of interest is a particularly high representation of foreign language films, with Anatomy of a Fall, Past Lives and The Zone of Interest all making it onto the Best Picture list – the latter also featuring on the Best International Film shortlist, the first British production to do so since the Welsh-language Solomon & Gaenor, in 1999.

It’s perhaps notable too that with Oscar nominations usually being shared largely between films released during the awards-baiting season at the tail end of the year, this year’s biggest hitter – and biggest talking point – were both released during the peak of the summer box office. It’s been suggested that this could partly be down to the actors’ strike denting promotion opportunities, but Oppenheimer and Barbie came out a week into the strike, while Killers of the Flower Moon and Nyad came out towards the end of the walkout and still managed multiple acting nominations.

Last year’s big winner, Everything Everywhere All At Once, also came out earlier in the year, but that was distributed by one of the big streamers, Amazon, during a post-Covid period when the studios were mostly releasing big-budget franchise films. This set of nominations, with the pandemic feeling like a distant memory, the big studios seem to be back in the driving seat, with Universal releasing Oppenheimer, Nolan’s former distributor, Warner Bros, being responsible for Barbie and Poor Things being released by Disney-owned Searchlight. Of the most nominated films, only Killers of the Flower Moon comes from a streamer, in this case, Apple. Netflix has the most nominations, but mostly for smaller films, such as Maestro and Nyad.

With a handful of awards already dished out but some of the most influential still to come, it’s too early to get a clear indication of where the top prizes will go – but you can be sure that in the coming weeks, speculators will be speculating. But with each set of awards coming from a different – if overlapping – set of voters, there’s always scope for surprises. No-one will know all the answers until the Oscars are finally awarded – at a ceremony in Hollywood on 10th March – to the winners picked from the following full list of nominees: