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BEST FILM NOMINEES Alfonso Cuarón, David Heyman
OTH ER N O M I N ATED CATEGORIES Cinematography; Director; Editing; Leading Actress; Original Music; Original Screenplay; Outstanding British Film; Production Design; Sound; Special Visual Effects
Not least thanks to recurring maelstroms of lethal space debris from an exploded satellite that decimate everything in their path, death arrives in silence. And in these moments, you forget to breathe. Cosmic metaphors float easily in this kind of space: a simple story about the human refusal to ever let go of life, even against inevitable, eternal nothingness. Indeed, Bullock’s heavenly body curling into a zero-G foetal position – a simultaneous feat of effortlessly evocative simplicity and gurn-inducing technical complexity – is a spectacle to sit next to Méliès’ rocket in the moon’s eye and Kubrick’s space stations waltzing to Strauss.