Why Oppenheimer should win the Oscar for Best Picture

Get our free weekly e mail for all the newest cinematic information from our movie critic Clarisse Loughrey

Get our The Life Cinematic e mail for free

Is all of it Oppenheimer’s to lose? Over the previous few months, the race for the Academy Award for Best Picture has gone from a crowded subject to a seemingly foregone conclusion. Following wins at the Baftas, Golden Globes and Critics Choice awards, Christopher Nolan’s three-hour biopic has all the momentum: Cillian Murphy seems set to take house Best Actor, for his haunted thousand-yard-stare of a efficiency as nuclear bomb mastermind J Robert Oppenheimer, whereas Nolan is a runaway favorite for Best Director.

There’s a lot to admire about Oppenheimer. A structurally difficult work, the movie flits between three timelines: Oppenheimer’s adolescence and the growth of the atom bomb; a 1954 safety listening to wherein Oppenheimer will get a calamitous grilling; and the 1959 US Senate affirmation listening to of oily politician Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr). There’s a surfeit of various characters, almost all performed by recognisable faces – everybody from Matt Damon to Rami Malek to Josh Hartnett. Oppenheimer could also be Nolan’s least expensive movie for almost 20 years (since 2006’s The Prestige in truth), but it surely feels huge in scope. The entire movie performs out in one thing resembling a perpetual montage, slowing down solely for moments of occasional horror – most notably the beautiful sequence of the atom bomb explosion roughly two hours into the movie. In phrases of craft (performing, route, modifying, manufacturing design, and a lot extra) Oppenheimer is first-rate, and deserves the plaudits this awards season. But it’s additionally a movie with one thing large and vital to say – and, much more importantly, it’s in some way managed to get folks to hear.

Oppenheimer is in truth an anomaly in the present cinema panorama: it’s a critical, adult-oriented movie that in some way managed to drag in the large viewers of a Marvel blockbuster (almost $1bn in complete). This is basically right down to Nolan’s repute, after all – the Dark Knight filmmaker is the single hottest behind-the-camera identify in modern cinema (if Steven Spielberg’s latest field workplace travails are something to go by). But Oppenheimer was additionally aided by stellar evaluations, robust phrase of mouth and, after all, the weird natural advertising and marketing phenomenon juxtaposing the movie with Barbie. Given the oddness and specificity of the “Barbenheimer” fad, it’s unclear whether or not the success of Oppenheimer will likely be replicable. But it speaks to a renewed urge for food for critical, grown-up movies, about real-world points. To say it has “saved cinema” is reductive – but when any movie could make that declare, it’s this one.

In latest years, the Academy Awards has struggled for relevance – as evidenced by the sharp decline in TV viewing figures (hitting an all-time low in the Covid-struck 2021 ceremony). The ceremonies have been outlined not by the movies they’re supposedly celebrating however by moments of superstar misadventure – Warren Beatty’s faulty Best Picture announcement in 2017, or Will Smith’s violent stage invasion in 2022. Increasingly, there was a way that the Oscars are indifferent from the viewing habits of normal folks. This shift isn’t axiomatically unhealthy – 20 years in the past, Best Picture winners corresponding to left-field South Korean drama Parasite and heart-wrenching queer drama Moonlight would by no means have been recognised. But even the tamer, supposedly extra “crowd-pleasing” latest winners – the likes of Green Book, CODA, and Everything Everywhere All at Once – have been comparatively obscure in the scheme of issues (grossing $321.8m, $2.2m and $143.4m respectively). If Oppenheimer wins, it is going to be by a distance the highest grossing Best Picture winner since The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King in 2004. It is not only a terrific movie however a terrific movie that individuals have really watched.

Oppenheimer transcends the doubtful sobriquet of “awards bait”, regardless of ostensibly becoming the standards as a good-looking and prestige-y biopic. It is just too difficult, too off-putting. It has turn out to be a success and an awards juggernaut whereas refusing to sand down its personal tough edges – the tough and miserable conclusions it attracts about morality, struggle, and science. Murphy provides a singular and profound flip as Oppenheimer, one that’s virtually sure to endure by way of the a long time; the query of whether or not or not he will get a statuette for his effort appears reasonably moot.

You may make the argument that Oppenheimer profitable is extra vital for the Oscars itself than for any of Nolan’s crew. Awards exhibits are, at the finish of the day, basically arbitrary and meaningless; there isn’t any goal metric making Oppenheimer “better” than Killers of the Flower Moon, or The Zone of Interest. But it’s a movie that individuals can get behind en masse, a movie that brings abnormal viewers, who won’t be cinephiles, into the dialog. It is tough, unequivocal proof that greatness and recognition needn’t be mutually unique; that mainstream audiences shouldn’t be underestimated or condescended to. If the Oscars are to avert a gradual slide into redundancy, Oppenheimer is the movie to do it.