How Oppenheimer Won Best Picture
In his films, Christopher Nolan loves to switch up a timeline. On Sunday night at the Oscars, he did the same: Somehow, Nolan and Oppenheimer were able to make it the 1990s again.
By the end of the night, Oppenheimer had won seven trophies — Best Picture, Director, Actor, Supporting Actor, Cinematography, Editing, and Score — tying last year’s big winner Everything Everywhere All at Once.
The proceedings brought to mind those ’90s ceremonies, when everyone knew The English Patient and Titanic were going to clean up. Here, too, the ultimate outcome was rarely in doubt. The Oscars are how Hollywood tells the story of itself, and in 2023 there was no bigger story at the movies than the lightning-in-a-bottle cultural phenomenon of Barbenheimer. Only one of them could win, of course, and of that pair of record-breaking blockbusters, Oppenheimer always appeared likelier than Barbie to find Oscar’s favor. It was a serious drama with weighty themes, a marvel of big-screen spectacle, a biopic that was also a World War II movie that was also a three-hour exploration of postwar America’s original sin. If Oppenheimer were any more the industry’s cup of tea, it’d be sitting in Christopher Nolan’s pocket.
Those suppositions were confirmed when the film swept through the precursors. Critics’ groups had tried to keep it interesting by awarding their top prizes to films like Killers of the Flower Moon and The Zone of Interest, but they were merely forestalling the inevitable. The revamped Golden Globes, eager not to put a foot wrong in their quest towards legitimacy, awarded Oppenheimer five trophies. The most influential industry groups — the Directors Guild, BAFTA, the Producers Guild, and the Screen Actors Guild — all fell for Oppie like a doomed Communist grad student.
On some level, the notion of going deep into how Oppenheimer won Best Picture is like publishing a detailed exegesis on why people like looking at Sydney Sweeney. Everyone already gets it! But consider this: For years, it has been conventional wisdom among awards strategists that, if there’s one thing you don’t want to be, it’s the early frontrunner. Go out ahead too early, the thinking goes, and you’ll spend the rest of the season with a target on your back. Recent seasons have been unkind to films that came into the fall with weighty expectations. Especially if, like Oppenheimer, they were intellectual dramas from major directors. The Fabelmans faltered, The Irishman tanked, and The Power of the Dog made voters go “woof.” In the post-2010 preferential ballot era, the way to win Best Picture was not through the head but through the heart. You had to be a lovable underdog, probably a dramedy with a big ensemble, like CODA. If you ended on a hug, like Green Book or Everything Everywhere All at Once, even better.
How did Oppenheimer break this pattern, cruising through the season with nary a hint of backlash? I think it came down to a few key factors.
Number one, obviously, is money. The Oscars have a mixed relationship with blockbusters. Academy members are rarely going to vote for something just because it was a hit — see: Spider-Man: No Way Home — but at the same time, they want to root for a success. Being a box-office champion makes a contender feel like a winner, and that glow is contagious. The brainy also-rans I listed above were either theatrical disappointments (The Fabelmans), or released straight to streaming (The Irishman, The Power of the Dog). Oppenheimer, by contrast, was not just successful; it outpaced even Universal’s wildest dreams, grossing nearly a billion dollars worldwide. Sure, Barbie made almost $500 million more, but that was a fun, fluffy comedy about the most famous doll in the world. Grading on a curve, as most experts did, Oppenheimer’s achievement was by far the more impressive.
And the credit for that can go to our second reason: Nolan himself. The notion of a filmmaker being “due” is a social construct — why was Quentin Tarantino not “due” in 2020 for Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood? — but that makes it no less real. In Hollywood, Nolan stands out as a filmmaker who’s a brand unto himself. Other directors may have been able to make a great film about J. Robert Oppenheimer, but only Nolan could have made one that audiences flocked to see in theaters.
Like the ensembles of CODA and EEAOO, the “Oppenhomies” rolled deep, and their genuine enjoyment of each other’s company added a much-needed levity to the campaign.
Like other major directors before him, Nolan had to wait for his moment. As the man partially responsible for the superhero-fication of Hollywood, he had a haphazard relationship with the Academy voters during his Batman era. But even then, his power was evident — after voters failed to give The Dark Knight its due in 2009, the Academy organization responded by expanding the Best Picture field. 2010’s Inception would be a beneficiary of that decision, but that film and 2014’s Interstellar were primarily recognized as craft achievements. 2017’s Dunkirk seemed for a moment like it could be Nolan’s Oscar breakthrough for combining two of voters’ favorite things: World War II and Mark Rylance in a cozy sweater. But though it earned him his first Best Director nod, he was eventually steamrolled by The Shape of Water. It was Guillermo Del Toro’s year, not his.
What made this Nolan’s time was the sense that, on Oppenheimer, he really had raised his game. While his previous films brought to mind a clever schoolboy doodling on graph paper, Oppenheimer saw Nolan imbue his peculiar obsessions — fractured timelines, show-stopping set pieces, dead paramours returning from the grave — with real thematic weight. The birth of the military industrial complex, the sociopolitical shift from war to Cold War, the price of colluding with power: It was all there. For its fans within the Academy, Oppenheimer deserved to be mentioned alongside the greats. “If you’re going to go longer than two-and-a-half hours, you’d better be The Godfather,” an Oscar-winning filmmaker told me in November. “And Oppenheimer is The Godfather.”
Nolan was never going to be Del Toro, a cuddly charmer on the campaign trail. But he did enough to cast aside the image of himself as a remote, professorial genius. His New York Film Critics Circle acceptance speech, about a Peloton instructor who hated one of his movies, dominated the news cycle for a week, and proved he was humble enough to laugh at himself. And though Nolan and Cillian Murphy were not natural backslappers, Robert Downey Jr, one of the most charismatic actors of his generation, was there to pick up the slack.
If Oppenheimer did not fit the model of a modern Oscar winner in most respects, it did feature one element that has become a secret weapon on the campaign trail: a large cast that all seemed to like each other. Like the ensembles of CODA and EEAOO, the “Oppenhomies” rolled deep, and their genuine enjoyment of each other’s company added a much-needed levity to the campaign. In December, I attended the launch party for Jada Yuan’s Oppenheimer book, which was held at a random house in Bed-Stuy. Even though this was by no means an official campaign event, David Krumholtz, Jack Quaid, and Olli Haaskivi all came through, just because. Krumholtz told a story about farting on set that he had probably told a thousand times. Stuff like this doesn’t mean much on its own, but collectively it helps dispel any aura of stuffiness that might have built up around the film.
Which brings me to the third reason Oppenheimer was able to cruise through the season: Barbenheimer itself. I have heard that, back in the summer, Team Oppenheimer were not exactly pleased with the meme. They worried it turned a serious attempt to grapple with one of the worst events in human history into a joke. I can’t argue with this, except to note that it is far better to be turned into a joke on your own terms than on anyone else’s. Not only was the Barbenheimer craze ultimately respectful of what both films were trying to accomplish, it helped shore up many of the campaign’s weak spots. A male dominated ensemble with some not-especially-great roles for women likely benefited from being paired with, rather than pitted against, the girliest movie of the year. A film concerned with political debates from decades long past was made to feel fresh, fun, and utterly contemporary. And then there was the money again. Had Oppenheimer not been able to draft off of Barbie, it still might have been a hit on the level of Dune: Part Two. But would that have been enough to make it a Best Picture slam dunk?
Oppenheimer benefited from an accident of timing in another respect, too. The film debuted on the eve of the SAG-AFTRA strike, so close to the edge that cast members were literally pulled from the U.S. premiere once the work stoppage went into effect. Fall releases like Poor Things and The Holdovers would have had plenty of ground to make up on Barbenheimer anyway, but trying a buzzy festival launch without the benefit of their stars left them lagging even further behind. In a strange way, the overall strength of this year’s field helped, too. Once it became clear on nomination morning that Barbie’s race was run, there was no consensus on what a possible Oppenheimer alternative would be.
Besides their scrambled editing and penchant for maximalism, Oppenheimer and Everything Everywhere All at Once are not the world’s most alike films. One introduces chaos into a world of order, the other finds order hidden in the chaos. Thanks to Barbenheimer, their awards trajectories wound up remarkably similar: two Internet-beloved blockbusters that swept their seasons, and together mark a turning point away from the “spread the wealth” ethos of Oscar’s preferential ballot era.
Did something change two years ago? While it’s tricky to ascribe individual agency to a group of thousands of people, it does seem as if the Academy saw a glimpse of its own mortality during COVID. If the Oscars were going to survive, they would need to embrace big, mainstream hits. Not superhero movies (perish the thought), but films that were undoubtedly influenced by them. Thinking-man’s blockbusters, even if, as in the case of EEAAO, they did not take the form of a traditional Oscar vehicle. Oppenheimer won by being two supposed opposites at the same time — new and old, classic and current, intellectual and commercial. How’s that for physics?