Cillian Murphy’s 2024 Best Actor Oscars Chances Now Have A Huge Advantage After The Last 10 Years

Cillian Murphy was already a front-runner for the Best Actor category at the 2024 Oscars for Oppenheimer, and his latest awards success makes his Academy Award win even more likely. Over a decade after rising to fame for his role in the 2002 horror movie 28 Days Later, Cillian Murphy finally received his first Oscar nomination for Best Actor for his performance as the titular character in Christopher Nolan’s 2023 movie Oppenheimer. Murphy’s nod for Best Actor is one of Oppenheimer‘s 13 nominations at the 2024 Oscars, which also includes Best Picture.

At the 2024 Oscars, J. Robert Oppenheimer actor Cillian Murphy is up against Paul Giamatti for The Holdovers, Colman Domingo for Rustin, Jeffrey Wright for American Fiction, and Bradley Cooper for Maestro in the Best Actor category. Based on the outcomes for the 2023-2024 awards season thus far, the two front-runners for Best Actor at the 96th Academy Awards have been Murphy and Giamatti. However, the 2024 SAG Awards have just given the biggest indication of who is most likely to win at the Oscars.

Cillian Murphy’s Best Actor Oscars Win Is Way More Likely After The 2024 SAG Awards

Cillian Murphy winning Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role in a Motion Picture at the Netflix-streaming 2024 SAG Awards all but confirms he’ll win Best Actor at the Oscars. The SAG Awards have been used as a reliable predictor of the Oscars’ acting category outcomes, so Murphy now has incredible odds to take home the Academy Award for Best Actor this year. Over the last decade, nearly every Best Actor Oscar winner also won Best Actor at the SAG Awards.

Since 2014, only two actors who won the SAG Award for Best Actor ultimately did not win in that category at the Oscars that same year, and both were debated as snubs at the latter ceremony. Denzel Washington won Best Actor at the SAG Awards for Fences but lost at the 2017 Oscars to Casey Affleck, while Chadwick Boseman posthumously won Best Actor at the SAG Awards for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom but lost in the category to Anthony Hopkins at the Oscars in 2021. Consequently, it would be a significant upset if Cillian Murphy were to lose Best Actor at the 2024 Oscars.

Cillian Murphy’s 2024 Oscars Win Would End A 15-Year Christopher Nolan Movie Drought

If Cillian Murphy wins Best Actor at the 2024 Oscars, it will mark the first time since The Dark Knight that an actor has won an Oscar for a Christopher Nolan movie. In 2009, Heath Ledger was posthumously awarded the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his role as the Joker in Nolan’s The Dark Knight, a movie which also happened to feature Murphy. Despite having notoriously stellar casts in his movies, The Dark Knight and Oppenheimer are the only two Christopher Nolan movies to receive acting nominations at the Oscars so far, and both may ultimately win.

Oppenheimer

Oppenheimer is a film by Christopher Nolan, which follows the theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the man behind the atomic bomb. Cillian Murphy will play the titular role, with the story based on the book American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin.

Release Date

July 21, 2023

Distributor(s)

Universal Pictures