The Current Debate is a column that connects the dots between great writing about a topic in the wider film conversation.
Oppenheimer (Christopher Nolan, 2023).
“If there’s a sense of disconnect between what’s on stage and the outside world,” Alison Willmore writes of the 96th Academy Awards in Vulture, “Hollywood’s always declared itself the kingdom of dreams.” That might well be true, but the ceremony’s ostrichlike indifference toward some of the issues dominating global headlines this year felt especially jarring. While pro-Palestine protesters outside the theater blocked traffic and held signs with messaging like, “What good is art that ignores genocide,” only Jonathan Glazer, director of the Holocaust drama The Zone of Interest (all films 2023 unless otherwise noted), which was crowned Best International Film, dared to address the bloodshed in Gaza and Israel. Per Time’s Judy Berman, his speech, which connected the unspeakable atrocities of the past to the horrors of today, “was a moment of moral courage inextricably intertwined with his film’s urgent message.”
It was also one of the very few surprises in the ceremony. Oppenheimer took home this year’s Academy Award for Best Picture. Christopher Nolan’s magisterial portrait of “father of the atomic bomb” J. Robert Oppenheimer arrived at the Dolby Theatre on March 10 with thirteen nominations to its name; Best Picture was one of the seven it converted into Oscar gold. Earlier in the night, prizes were also handed out to composer Ludwig Göransson, editor Jennifer Lame, cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, lead and supporting actors Cillian Murphy and Robert Downey Jr., and director Christopher Nolan, who took his first Oscar after eight nominations across two decades.
Other wins fell into typical patterns. Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things, which pundits began to peg as a favorite over the last few weeks, won four Oscars: for costume design, makeup and hairstyling, production design, and lead actress; that Emma Stone won over Lily Gladstone, nominated for her turn in Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, was probably the night’s biggest shock. Screenplay awards are often the wild cards of the night; this year, Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction nabbed the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay, while Anatomy of a Fall’s writer-director Justine Triet won Best Original Screenplay with her co-scribe Arthur Harari. Elsewhere, there was glory for two heavyweights: Wes Anderson, awarded the first Oscar of his career for his live-action short The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, and Hayao Miyazaki, whose The Boy and the Heron won Best Animated Feature.
The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (Wes Anderson, 2023).
Released the same weekend as Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, with which it was swiftly conjoined in what became affectionately known as the two-picture juggernaut “Barbenheimer,” Oppenheimer made nearly a billion dollars and picked up all manner of accolades since its premiere in July of last year. In hindsight, Richard Brody notes at the New Yorker, the reasons for its success with the Academy “are self-evident.”
The movie is about a serious historical and political subject, and it made a zillion dollars. It embodies the venerable formula of doing well while doing good. It’s safe to say that many people who work in movies would rather work on pictures that seem substantial than on ones that seem frivolous and commercial. Whatever the artistic shortcomings of “Oppenheimer,” the importance of its subject is undeniable, and so is Christopher Nolan’s ambition to make a movie that is worthy of that importance. But let’s be clear: if “Oppenheimer” had flopped, or just broken even, it would likely have had the same presence at this year’s ceremony as Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon”—ten respectful nominations, zero wins.
Legitimate as it may be—who could ever deny Oppenheimer’s staggering box-office results and the effects these might have had on the Academy’s voters?—Brody’s reading strikes me as too reductive. Oppenheimer’s Oscars success can’t be chalked up solely to its impressive financial returns, nor to the seriousness of its themes. Sure, this is, as Matt Damon’s General Leslie Groves warns us halfway through, a film about “the most important fucking thing that’s ever happened in the history of the world.” But any attempt to dissect its triumph must start by accounting for its director and the singular relationship he’s developed with the industry. “A figure with gravitas, if not exactly possessed of knock-’em-dead showmanship,” per The Guardian’s Andrew Pulver,
Nolan was one of those directors with a big name who, hitherto, had never quite got his ducks in a row for a serious Oscar bid. But that changed this time around, with a release pattern that included a moneyspinning run in Imax theatres, and an awards campaign that concentrated on the director’s technical and craft abilities as well as his outspoken love for the moving image and theatrical screening. A vote for "Oppenheimer" began to look like a vote for the film industry itself.
Of all the narratives that orbited the film on its way to Oscar night, this is by far the most fascinating. As it was for Tom Cruise just last year—when the success of his Top Gun: Maverick (2022) brought many, perhaps most famously Steven Spielberg, to applaud him as the man who single-handedly saved not only “Hollywood’s ass” but also “the entire theatrical industry”—Nolan has been hailed, all through the awards season, in near-messianic terms. Seen from the industry’s perspective, that’s easy enough to understand. Oppenheimer’s landslide on March 10 might as well be pegged as “the revenge of the studio movie,” Brooks Barnes observes at the New York Times. Made by Universal Pictures, Nolan’s latest “is something of a throwback—an expensive film from an old-line studio.” It stands in jarring contrast to the smaller, independent movies that have won Hollywood’s top prize in recent years: from Moonlight (2016) to Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), via Nomadland (2020) and CODA (2021).
Surveying the Best Picture hopefuls over at the New Yorker, Justin Chang prophesied Oppenheimer would ultimately snatch the coveted statuette “because it was written and directed by Christopher Nolan, a hugely respected hitmaker and big-studio auteur whose long-delayed moment of recognition has finally come.” Dueness is a powerful if dangerously unpredictable factor at the Oscars, but Nolan was able to couple that with something far more inebriating. Long, long before March 10, the director had cemented himself as “the only cinema brand as strong as the IP behemoths that rule the box office,” Dan Kois contends at Slate. A defender of maximalist cinema—and of theatrical distribution as the sole way to do that spectacle justice—Nolan is “devoted to saving his multibillion-dollar industry, and he seems like the only person who just might be able to do it.”
Barbie (Greta Gerwig, 2023).
Still, this savior narrative deserves better spelling. Important as they may be, “box office bucks can’t be the only metric of cinematic success,” Kate Erbland writes at IndieWire. “Frankly, they might be the least essential of said metrics, though they sure make Hollywood brass sit up and pay attention.” Whether or not Oppenheimer—and its better half, Barbie—can be said to have saved the industry, both films reminded us that people will still flock to theaters for daring and genuinely original experiences. Indeed, Louis Chilton suggests at The Independent, Nolan’s latest “transcends the dubious sobriquet of ‘awards bait’, despite ostensibly fitting the criteria as a handsome and prestige-y biopic.”
It is simply too challenging, too off-putting. It has become a hit and an awards juggernaut while refusing to sand down its own rough edges – the difficult and depressing conclusions it draws about morality, war, and science. […] You could make the argument that “Oppenheimer” winning was more important for the Oscars itself than for any of Nolan’s team. Awards shows are, at the end of the day, fundamentally arbitrary and meaningless; there is no objective metric making “Oppenheimer” “better” than “Killers of the Flower Moon,” or “The Zone of Interest.” But it’s a film that people can get behind en masse, a film that brings ordinary viewers, who might not be cinephiles, into the conversation. It is hard, unequivocal proof that greatness and popularity need not be mutually exclusive; that mainstream audiences shouldn’t be underestimated or condescended to.
“There have been very few Oscar evenings celebrating films that were both titanic megahits and true works of art,” Owen Gleiberman echoes at Variety, which made this year “a throwback that doubled as a kind of hope for the future.” The film industry will thrive “only when it remembers its true north, which is making movies that have the power to form memories and to form history, movies that can have the impact of an ‘Oppenheimer’ because, in a word, they matter.”
While I can’t help but worry about what this means for filmmakers who cannot muster resources on par with Nolan’s, Gleiberman’s argument does point to one of the most significant changes the industry has witnessed in recent months. If there’s anything the worldwide success of Barbenheimer has shown, Derek Thompson argues at The Ringer, it is that the divide between “prestige” and popular cinema now seems to be shrinking.
For much of the past 10 or 15 years, popularity and prestige have come apart in Hollywood. The biggest movies have almost exclusively been comic book franchises, sequels, and adaptations, while the Best Picture winners have often been small films, like “CODA” or “Moonlight.” But in the past 18 months, two things have changed. First, the old franchise model is showing some wear and tear, as Marvel movies consistently underperform their expectations. Second, original and often daring films—“Barbie,” “Oppenheimer,” “Dune: Part Two”—are dominating at the box office.
I’m not entirely convinced the franchise era is over: a cursory glance at this year’s release calendar shows several IP projects in the pipeline, some of which might well wind up among 2024’s highest grossing titles. And though Denis Villeneuve was likely granted much greater creative agency than the filmmakers toiling for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it bears noting that his Dune diptych itself draws from IP, if one that’s hardly been as mined and rebooted as other mainstream franchises.
Dune: Part Two (Denis Villeneuve, 2024).
But even if the time of run-of-the-mill sequels and multiverses might—finally—be crumbling, who or what will take their place? This isn’t some abstract thought experiment. Giant streamers, Stephanie Zacharek helpfully notes at Time, have begun to raise their fees, while their commitment to funding big endeavors by ambitious filmmakers is declining. Which means it’s time for us to decide which side we’re on: “the side of those trying to make great movies, or the side of those eager to make money off us in any way possible.”
What is it, exactly, that we want? Do we want more thoughtful movies, made by established filmmakers, that are actually about something (like “Oppenheimer” or “Killers of the Flower Moon”)? Do we want more low-cost but energetic projects like “American Fiction,” which give great performers—like that movie’s star, Jeffrey Wright—the chance to shine? Do we want more oddball successes like “Poor Things,” which earned a total of four Oscars, including one for Holly Waddington’s gloriously inventive costumes? The answer to all of those questions is Yes—if we care about movies as an art form, we want it all. And streaming services, if they choose to, can still pour money into projects like those. But it's essential to give them a shot in theaters, where they can fulfill every inch of their big-screen potential.
Perhaps, then, rather than anointing a blockbuster auteur as the ultimate savior of the medium, we should start by questioning how we can all actively shape its course. The future of cinema—its endurance and vitality, the breadth and quality of all its expressions, never mind the size of the screen onto which they’re beamed—depends on both those who make it and those who watch it, which is to say us. Oppenheimer’s achievement doesn’t mean producers will now regularly pump hundreds of millions of dollars into new, idiosyncratic projects with similarly weighty subjects; if anything, they’ll be more likely to take a chance on Nolan’s next film rather than films “like” Oppenheimer helmed by lesser-known filmmakers. But is that what would really save cinema, anyway? Picking up his Oscar, American Fiction writer-director Cord Jefferson called the industry “risk-averse,” and suggested that “instead of making one $200 million movie,” we should spread those resources to ensure space for new, bold voices. “Try making twenty $10 million movies,” he quipped, “or 50 $4 million movies.”
Whether or not that pluralist and heterogenous landscape will ever see the light of day, in the end, depends on us. To borrow again from Zacharek, “Do we really want more stuff, or do we still want movies made with thought and care, pictures that spark new feelings or sensations?” If the answer is the latter, then the onus is on us to stay open, curious, and hungry for the unknown.