After much speculation, the full list of nominees for this year’s Oscars is now in — and there’s one movie that’s leading the pack. While a number of films have received multiple nominations for 2022’s ceremony, the 94th Academy Awards, western drama The Power of the Dog is leaving the rest in the dust as Oscar voters have presented it with a total of 12 nominations across 11 different categories.
Those dozen nominations include almost all of the major prizes, excluding Best Actress, but that’s only because the film arguably doesn’t have one. Power of the Dog is up for Best Picture, though it faces stiff competition from such other acclaimed films as Belfast, Nightmare Alley, and West Side Story. What’s more, Jane Campion is nominated for Best Director alongside the likes of Licorice Pizza’s Paul Thomas Anderson and Drive My Car‘s Ryusuke Hamaguchi.
Benedict Cumberbatch is, of course, in the running for Best Actor, with Kirsten Dunst nominated for Best Supporting Actress. Interestingly, co-stars Jesse Plemons and Kodi Smit-McPhee are running against each other in the Best Supporting Actor category, though that only increases the movie’s chances of securing the Best Picture, though it might decrease the actors’ chances.
Power is also nominated for many of the technical prizes too, namely, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Original Score, Best Sound, Best Production, Best Cinematography, and Best Film Editing. The only other movie to come close to its dominance at this year’s awards is Denis Villeneuve’s Dune, which sports 10 nominations, including Best Picture, although it’s not represented in any of the acting categories.
The Power of the Dog previously earned itself seven Golden Globes noms, winning Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor for Smit-McPhee, and Best Director for Campion. This is the second Oscar nomination for both Campion, following 1994’s The Piano, and Cumberbatch, after 2014’s The Imitation Game. The film is streaming on Netflix worldwide.
