There's lots of things under the physics umbrella out there, and the Nobel committee has refrained for giving a prize for string theory or other speculative BSM physics for decades; there's no reason to think they'll change, especially given the recent downturn in the popularity of those fields. The Nobel isn't restricted to fundamental physics. You can look at the awards from the recent years to get a sense of what gets honored when there are no fundamental advances: laser spectroscopy, magnetoresistance, optical fibers, semiconductors, graphene, etc.

I must emphatically disagree with your statement. There are plenty of very hard theoretical problems that experiments are regularly shedding new light on. The entire field of condensed matter and most of atomic, molecular and optical physics progress by both theory and experiment figuring out problems together.

Perhaps by "physics" you meant "particle physics"... but even in that field your statement would be hard to justify.