One Battle After Another has broken records by earning 16 nominations on the BAFTA longlist, setting it up as a frontrunner for awards season.
The Paul Thomas Anderson political satire received nods in the category of best film, director and adapted screenplay and also dominated the performance lists with nominations for Chase Infiniti, Leonardo DiCaprio, Teyana Taylor, Benicio Del Toro and Sean Penn.
Hot on its heels are Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet and Ryan Coogler’s Sinners with 14 longlist slots each. They are followed by Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme with 13 nods and Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia and Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein both scoring 12. Meanwhile, Sentimental Value and Wicked: For Good made eight lists apiece.
British films also performed well on the longlist, with six nominations for I Swear and Pillion and five for The Ballad of Wallis Island.
However, Jafar Panahi’s Palme d’Or-winning It Was Just an Accident performed worse than expected, its only longlist mentions for original screenplay and film not in the English language. The Secret Agent had the same nominations, while Sirāt only managed two as well for casting and film in the English language.
The full list of nominations will be confirmed on January 27 with Rising Star nominees announced earlier on January 14. The ceremony, hosted for the first time by Alan Cumming, takes place on February 22 at London’s Royal Festival Hall.
With a score from Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, One Battle After Another stars DiCaprio as Bob Ferguson, a washed-up ex-revolutionary who leads a team in the attempted rescue of the daughter of one of their own. Sean Penn, Benicio Del Toro, Regina Hall, Teyana Taylor, Chase Infiniti and Alana Haim co-star.
In a four-star review of the film, NME wrote: “Operatic in its intensity and lush in its visuals (Anderson shot with old-school film format VistaVision), it’s a sometimes ragged, unwieldy experience. Like the recent Eddington, it’s another throw-it-against-the-wall-to-see-what-sticks movie. Some of it doesn’t. But thank the lord this $130m barmy blockbuster exists. From a pregnant Perfidia firing off rounds from her machine gun to an unforgettable finale on the undulating desert roads, it’s a mad stir of America’s melting pot on the cusp of boiling over.”