Jeffrey Wright, Emma Stone earn acting nods from S.F. Critics Circle.
“Oppenheimer,” Christopher Nolan’s epic about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the conflicted father of the atomic bomb, was selected Tuesday as the best film of 2023 by the San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle.
Partially shot in the East Bay, including a few scenes on the UC Berkeley campus where Oppenheimer worked as a professor, the film nabbed two other awards — one for Robert Downey Jr.’s supporting turn as Oppenheimer rival Lewis Strauss and for the film’s stunning, at times staggering cinematography.
Nolan’s Oscar-ready box-office sensation, one half of last summer’s “Barbenheimer” phenom, tied with “The Zone of Interest,” Jonathan Glazer’s unique film about Auschwitz death camp commandant Rudolf Hoss (opening Jan. 12 in Bay Area theaters) in receiving the most honors — three — from the critics group.
Other top winners include Jeffrey Wright (best actor) for his tone-perfect performance as a frustrated author in Cord Jefferson’s hilarious but pointed “American Fiction,” and Emma Stone for her daring turn as a revived woman who hits her feminist groove in the wild “Poor Things.”
Here are the winners and runners up by category.
Winner: “Oppenheimer”
Runner-up: “Killers of the Flower Moon
Winner: Jonathan Glazer, “The Zone of Interest”
Runner-up: Christopher Nolan, “Oppenheimer
Winner: Jeffrey Wright, “American Fiction”
Runners-up: Cillian Murphy, “Oppenheimer,” and Andrew Scott, “All of Us Strangers” (tie)
Winner: Emma Stone, “Poor Things”
Runner-up: Sandra Hüller, “Anatomy of a Fall”
Winner: Celine Song, “Past Lives”
Runner-up: David Hemingson, “The Holdovers”
Winner: Cord Jefferson, “American Fiction”
Runner-up: Christopher Nolan, “Oppenheimer”
Winner: Robert Downey Jr., “Oppenheimer”
Runner-up: Charles Melton, “May December”
Winner: Da’Vine Joy Randolph, “The Holdovers”
Runner-up: Sandra Hüller, “The Zone of Interest”
Winner: “The Boy and the Heron”
Runner-up: “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse”
Winner: “The Zone of Interest”
Runner-up: “Anatomy of a Fall”
Winner: “20 Days in Mariupol”
Runner-up: “American Symphony”
Winner: Hoyte Van Hoytema, “Oppenheimer”
Runner-up: Robbie Ryan, “Poor Things”
Winner: Sarah Greenwood, “Barbie”
Runner-up: James Price and Shona Heath (production designers) and Zsuzsa Mihalek (set decorator)
Winner: Paul Watts, “The Zone of Interest”
Runner-up: Jennifer Lame, “Oppenheimer”
Winner: Robbie Robertson, “Killers of the Flower Moon”
Daniel Pemberton, “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse”
In addition, the group presented the Marlon Riggs Award, given annually to someone who “represents courage and innovation in the world of cinema,” to Area filmmaker and visual storyteller H.P. Mendoza for his boundary-pushing work that includes a multimedia version of his 2021 art installation “Attack, Decay, Release,” and his latest award-winning narrative feature, “The Secret Art of Human Flight.” The Critics Circle also awarded its Special Citation Award for Independent Cinema to the films “Earth Mama” and “Fremont” (in a tie), with “The Blue Caftan” as runner-up.
