Oscars 2024: Christopher Nolan wins ‘Best Director’ for ‘Oppenheimer’
Christopher Nolan has claimed the ‘Best Director’ award for his biopic Oppenheimer, which chronicles the life and times of the creator of the atomic bomb.
Managing to condense the spectacular story of the real-life scientist into a concise three-hour masterwork, Nolan has changed the face of biography filmmaking, with Oppenheimer being the highest-grossing movie of its kind. Highly deserving of the honour, Nolan beat out the likes of Martin Scorsese, Yorgos Lanthimos and Justine Triet, who were nominated for Killers of the Flower Moon, Poor Things and Anatomy of a Fall, respectively.
Starring Cillian Murphy as Oppenheimer, the film tracks the life of the complex scientist from the moment he was brought onto the Trinity project, which sought to create the atom bomb, to his time living in moral confusion years after the dropping of the bomb on America’s Japanese targets in 1945. An impressive supporting cast, including Florence Pugh, Matt Damon and Emily Blunt, join Murphy in the lead roles.
Speaking about the movie in our four-and-a-half-star review, we stated: “In Oppenheimer, Cillian Murphy portrays the reluctant ‘father of the atomic bomb’, J. Robert Oppenheimer, finally being given the lead role-nod in a Nolan film, having starred in five of his previous efforts. Unsurprisingly, given his undoubted talent as an actor, Murphy delivers a performance of dedication, nuance and, most importantly, believability”.
Continuing, the review added: “It’s fair to say that Oppenheimer had a fair few megatons of pressure on his slight shoulders, and Nolan’s film throws us straight into such intensity, with just the right amount of biographical information leading up to the main events. We’re spared Oppenheimer’s youth in favour of his days as a student, then a lecturer and finally as the man who would change the world”.
Nolan joins a long list of esteemed recent ‘Best Director’ Oscar winners, including Chloé Zhao, Jane Campion, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert.
Has Christopher Nolan won an Oscar before?
Until tonight and the emergence of his awards juggernaut Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan had never won an Oscar before, despite being nominated five times previously. His first came in 2002 when he received a nod for ‘Best Original Screenplay’ for Memento, with more nominations coming nine years later when Inception gained recognition for another screenplay award as well as ‘Best Picture’.
Before Oppenheimer, the WWII drama Dunkirk was Nolan’s last film, which took the Oscars limelight, and it was nominated for ‘Best Director’ and ‘Best Picture’ in 2018. A master of grand, epic cinema, Nolan has long attracted awards thanks to the sheer size and scope of his pictures, with the director being considered one of the industry’s most treasured filmmaking assets alongside the Canadian Denis Villeneuve.
Struggling to even get Memento, his first major movie, made, Nolan once told Hollywood Reporter, “It was a really unique road. I don’t think I’ll ever have a moment like that [again] in my career…We took a huge knock, back as far as we could go. But we came back from it with sheer good fortune…When I look back, the key thing for me when we started to get traction for Following on the festival circuit was that I had already finished the script for Memento”.
What’s Christopher Nolan’s next movie project?
Though he has not yet revealed what his next movie project could be, it has been rumoured for quite some time that Christopher Nolan could be in line to take on the next James Bond film. The next 007 actor hasn’t yet been announced, but this could only serve to demonstrate that there seems to, indeed, be time for Nolan to jump on board, turning the Bond franchise into the behemoth that its producers so dearly want it to be.
Speaking about what he is drawn to in modern cinema, the director stated in an interview with Time Magazine: “I’m drawn to working at a large scale because I know how fragile the opportunity to marshal those resources is…I know that there are so many filmmakers out there in the world who would give their eye teeth to have the resources I put together, and I feel I have the responsibility to use them in the most productive and interesting way”.
His fellow filmmaking friend and peer of cinematic epics, Denis Villeneuve, has recently created his own successful franchise in the form of the sci-fi series Dune, so Nolan may look towards Bond and see a similar opportunity to enter into big-budget box-office cinema.
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