Oscars 2024: Cillian Murphy leads sky-high Irish hopes as nominees fly out

Not since 1990 has an Irish-born actor won the best Oscar, though Daniel Day-Lewis, now an Irish resident and citizen, has won two since then.

Day-Lewis promised famously there would be “one hell of a party in Dublin” after he and Brenda Fricker picked up the Oscars in 1990 for their performances in My Left Foot.

Almost 35 years on, Cillian Murphy is the favourite to win best actor for his towering performance as J Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, in the film Oppenheimer, which is also favourite to win best picture.

Murphy flew to Los Angeles on an Aer Lingus flight on Wednesday with a wind at his back in this movie awards season. He won best actor at the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) awards last month and a similar gong at the Golden Globe – awards that are usually good harbingers for the Oscars.

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Though most Irish attention will be on Murphy for Sunday night’s Oscar ceremony, there is more Irish talent on show in Poor Things, which is second only to Oppenheimer in the number of nominations, with 11.

Poor Things, a fantasy about a woman who dies by suicide and is given the brain of her unborn child, is produced by Element Pictures. It was filmed almost entirely on huge, specially constructed stage sets in Budapest, Hungary where a 19th-century screenscape was recreated.

It is a third nomination for producers Andrew Lowe and Ed Guiney following on from Room (2015) and The Favourite (2019).

This time Mr Lowe is taking his wife and children to Los Angeles for the Oscar ceremony for the first time.

[ Oscars 2024: How Dublin’s Element Pictures has set new records for Irish film ]

Poor Things, which stars Emma Stone, has been a commercial and critical success, surpassing $100 million (€90 million) at the box office last weekend.

“Ed are I are the lead producers on the films. The production was totally managed out of Ireland. We had Paul Heffernan as our head of production and Mark Byrne [as] head of business affairs and they were all actively involved in managing the production,” he said.

“Ireland was the headquarters for the whole production of the film. It was a big step up for us. It is really about surrounding Yorgos with the best team we could find,” he added, referring to the film’s director Yorgos Lanthimos.

He says 10 of Element’s staff will be travelling to Los Angeles along with a lot of post-production people. They will all be at the annual Oscar Wilde Awards, which celebrate the Irish in the entertainment industry, on Thursday in the Bad Robot in Santa Monica where the Irish traditionally gather during Oscar week.

Ireland’s third Oscar hopeful is London-based Robbie Ryan, who is nominated in the category for best cinematography for Poor Things. It’s his second nomination. He was similarly nominated in 2019 for The Favourite.

Many members of his extended family, including his sister Gillie O’Loughlin and his brother Dave Ryan, are travelling to Los Angeles for the Oscars.

“I’m more nervous for my family who are coming over. They are very excited. I like doing the work. I don’t mind the rest of it, but I wouldn’t go searching it out,” he said.

[ Oscars 2024: full coverage ]

“I just wanted to be on film sets. It is such a joy to this job. My parents were sceptical in the beginning, but, like everything else in life, if you work hard, it will reap dividends. It doesn’t feel like work for me.”

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