Can Jessica Buckley bag the big one at the Oscars?

All eyes will be on Killarney native Jessica Buckley this weekend to see if she can nab a Best Actress Oscar for her heartbreaking turn as William Shakespeare’s wife mourning their lost son in Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet. If she does, it will be the first time an Irish woman has received the accolade.

Brendan Fricker won Best Supporting Actress for My Left Foot in 1989. That wasn’t quite the same thing. Neither was the Honorary Oscar Maureen O’Hara picked up in 2014, the so-called Deathbed Award.

It’s Jessie’s second time to be nominated, the last being in 2022 when she was up for The Lost Daughter. She wasn’t expected to win on that occasion but she is this year, being a runaway favourite at 1/16.

It’s a gala year for Ireland. Other Irish nominees include Derry’s Maggie O’Farrell, co-nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay for Hamnet with Zhao, Ed Guiney and Andrew Lowe co-nominated for producing Bugonia, animator John Kelly for Retirement Plan and Richard Baneham for Best Visual Effects in Avatar: Fire and Ash.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s epic One Battle After Another, dealing with an ex-revolutionary called back into action after he and his daughter are pursued by a corrupt military officer, will probably sweep the boards in most of the other categories.

These are Best Film, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor (Sean Penn), Supporting Actress (Teyana Taylor), Cinematography, Editing, Production Design, Original Score, Sound and Best Adapted Screenplay.

It will probably lose out in the Best Actor category. Timothee Chalamet, nominated for Marty Supreme, is tipped to pip Leonardo DiCaprio here. There’s an outside chance Stellan Skarsgard could win Best Supporting Actor for Sentimental Value and deny Penn.

Best Cinematography may elude it as well if Ryan Coogler’s vampiric Sinners sneaks up on the blind side. Could Sinners’ Wumni Mosaku deny Taylor? It’s chew-your-fingernails time.

 Sinners has a string of other nominations too. Expect to hear this film title as well as of One Battle After Another read out frequently on Sunday night.

Needless to say, there’ll be some surprises. It’s a long time now since Marlon Brando and George C. Scott shocked us all by refusing their Oscars in two successive years in the seventies. We’ve had other howlers since then, like when La La Land was mistakenly announced as Best Picture in 2017, or when Will Smith whacked Chris Rock across the face in 2022 when Rock made a crack about Smith’s wife’s alopecia.

Will you stay up into the wee hours watching the event live – the test of a real Oscarphile – or content yourself with Monday night’s highlights? I pity the nominees who have to sit with frozen expressions on their faces for hours waiting for the news that they’ve lost, and then having to drum up a fake smile for the winner.

As Bob Hope quipped one year when he was hosting the event, “That’s probably the best acting you’ll see
all night.”