Barbenheimer‘s day is done. Oppenheimer‘s night is here.
At any rate, that is how awards season has been playing out in the lead-up to Sunday’s 96th Annual Academy Awards (on ABC at 4:00 p.m.).
Greta Gerwig’s living-doll of a Barbie movie handily won the hot-pink vs. dark-brooding competition at the box office, raking in $1.4 billion as the year’s biggest smash while also dominating the year’s memes and becoming the most successful woman-directed film in history.
Now though — if the Golden Globes, Critics Choice, BAFTA and Hollywood’s guild ceremonies are any indication — it will be Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s IMAX portrait of the father of the atom bomb, that’ll be raking in the gold statuettes.

Timing, diversity and (hopefully) more viewers
Host Jimmy Kimmel will start the evening’s festivities at the Dolby Theater an hour earlier than usual, one of several strategies the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is employing to lure TV viewers back to something approaching pre-pandemic (30 million+) levels. (The last three years have averaged less than half that.)