Oscars 2019: Actress Olivia Colman and director discuss 'The Favourite' getting big nomination

'The Favourite' is celebrating 10 Oscar nominations including Best Picture, Best Actress and two for Best Supporting Actress.

Olivia Colman plays Britain's 18th-century Queen Anne as a heartbroken widow whose pet rabbits that have the run of her palatial bedchamber are surrogates for the 17 children she has lost during or soon after pregnancy.

The story is based on the real-life relationship between the queen and Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, played by Rachel Weisz, who, as the queen's closest confidante, is able to sway national policy to suit her own ends.

When Sarah takes on an impoverished cousin, Emma Stone's Abigail, as a maid, she soon finds she has a dangerous rival for the queen's favours.

Colman has received a Best Actress Oscar nomination for her performance while Stone and Weisz face off in the Best Supporting Actress category. In an interview in August, she said, "It is happening slightly more often than it used to. I mean, this wouldn't have happened a few years ago, and playing opposite Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz. I mean only in film world could someone like Queen Anne have pulled those two hot women. So I was punching above my weight but it was very cool and they are lovely they will be friends for life."

'The Favourite' has already won a slew of awards including Grand Jury Prize and Best Actress awards at the Venice Film Festival last year as well as Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy for Colman.

Helmed by Yorgos Lanthimos, who has received a Best Director nod, 'The Favourite' is a relatively conventional costume drama without the surrealism of his arthouse hits 'The Lobster' or 'The Killing of a Sacred Deer', but it shares those films' vicious sense of humour. 

Meanwhile, Yorgos in an earlier interview said, "My main interest was, this time around, to create those three female characters which I thought was something that you rarely see in cinema, so that was the starting point for me and, of course, the fact that not only is it a very intimate story around three women but the fact that their story can say many things about the way people in power affect the fates and lives of many people around them and it doesn't matter if they are female or male or whatever."

The winners of the 91st Academy Awards will be announced in Los Angeles, California, on Sunday, February 24, 2019.