This year's Oscar nominations are a celebration of the old

Over the last few years, it has been noted that Oscar voters love nothing more than piling praise on old white men, and this year’s Academy Awards nominations have saluted two of the oldest and whitest around. One was Christopher Plummer, who at the age of 88 years, one month and ten days, became the oldest acting nominee in the ceremony’s history. While over in the best adapted screenplay category, James Ivory, who is 18 months and six days older, made him look like a whippersnapper.

Plummer and Ivory were deservedly nominated for some very fine work – the former for playing the oil baron J Paul Getty in All The Money In The World, the latter for his script for Call Me By Your Name – and in any other year, either of them would have been record-breakers outright. But in the class of 2018, both fell in the venerable shadow of the French director Agnès Varda – who at the fine age of 89 years, seven months and 24 days, became the oldest competitive Oscar nominee on record.

One of the leading figures of the French New Wave in the 1950s and 60s, Varda had just celebrated her first birthday when the first Oscar ceremony was held at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel on May 16, 1929. Almost 89 years later, she has received her first nomination for her documentary Faces Places, which she co-directed with the French street artist JR. The honorary award presented to Varda at the Academy’s Governor’s Ball last year now looks less like a consolation prize than a warm-up.

So today's nominations were unquestionably a celebration of the old – but crucially, not the same old. The films in contention are an impressively wide range of prestige pictures, critical darlings and punchy left-field choices without a hint of dutiful box-ticking, which suggests the Academy’s ongoing initiative to diversify their membership, begun in 2015, is bearing fruit.

The nine-strong Best Picture line-up included two heavyweight historical dramas, Darkest Hour and The Post – but also two horror films in Get Out and The Shape of Water, two very different coming-of-age stories in Call Me By Your Name and Lady Bird, a bona fide summer blockbuster in Dunkirk, a jet-black comedy in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, and whatever-on-earth Phantom Thread is: period tragicomedy, gothic romance, Daniel Day-Lewis’s swan-song, take your pick.

For the most part, British cinema-goers also escaped the usual frustration of a shortlist crammed with films that haven’t actually opened here yet – although Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water, arguably now the de facto front-runner with 13 nominations, is one of them. (It arrives in the UK on Valentine’s Day, which is as good a time as any for the tender tale of a mute cleaning lady who falls in love with a glistening fish-man.)

The season’s biggest success story to date, Martin McDonagh’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, arguably lost its barely nose-length lead over the pack: seven nominations counts as nothing but good news for the Film4-backed production, but its absence in the Best Director category suggests the strength of feeling at the Academy might not be quite vigorous enough to propel it to Best Picture on March 4.

If in doubt, consult the Oscar lore, which has it that any respectable Best Picture contender would do well to have nominations for acting, directing and its screenplay in its pocket. That bodes well for The Shape of Water, Get Out and Lady Bird, whose director Greta Gerwig became only the fifth woman to be recognised by the Academy’s directing branch. Yet this year’s race remains more open than any other in recent memory, and it’s even possible that the eight-times-nominated Dunkirk – not exactly a performance or screenplay-driven film in the traditional sense – could conceivably buck long-established voting trends.

That could just be wishful thinking on my part (big Dunkirk fan here), although if Christopher Nolan doesn’t at least win Best Director for his extraordinary present-tense war epic, it’s hard to know what more he’d have to do in order to snag it. Still, he’s far from Britain’s surest thing: that would be Gary Oldman, whose career-crowning performance as Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour has made him a frontrunner for this year’s Best Actor award since the film started screening at festivals last September. The bookmakers, at least, are sold on it: Ladbrokes slashed his odds of winning to 1/10 on as soon as his nomination was announced. But I’m not convinced Oldman can rest easy just yet: we don’t yet know whether the Academy’s newer voters are as keen to honour actors whose “time has come” as their predecessors – see Leonardo DiCaprio's 2016 win – so it’s still possible that he might be pipped by his fellow Londoner, 28-year-old Daniel Kaluuya, or Call Me By Your Name’s winsome 22-year-old Timothée Chalamet.

Among the other British contenders are Lesley Manville, Oldman’s former spouse, nominated for her tremendous supporting work in Phantom Thread, and Sally Hawkins, the lead actress in The Shape of Water, whose unenviably tough category also includes Frances McDormand and 21-time nominee Meryl Streep. McDormand has felt like the front-runner since Three Billboards burnt the house down at the Venice Film Festival last year, but it would be wrong to discount Saoirse Ronan, a three-time nominee at 23, while Margot Robbie’s performance as the figure skater Tonya Harding in I, Tonya is the kind of full-blooded passion-project work that has serious awards-night appeal.

As a first-time nominee, Robbie will probably have to wait a little while longer before she’s ushered up to the Dolby Theatre stage: not for as long as Agnès Varda, you’d have to hope, though when it comes to Oscar night, anything is possible: just ask Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty. Even Netflix was finally allowed out of the documentary paddock: the streaming service’s Deep South period drama Mudbound, directed by Dee Rees, was nominated for four awards including Best Cinematography, making Rachel Morrison the first woman to ever be nominated in that category, which was the last remaining all-male Oscar stronghold to date. The ceremony might be approaching its ninth decade, but there are many milestones it has yet to pass.