Chris Nolan's 'Oppenheimer' Is The Oscar Champion We Needed (But Didn't Deserve)
Hollywood's most successful director delivered the first blockbuster best picture winner in decades, 15 years after an awards season shift his 'Dark Knight' created
For several reasons, the notion of having Steven Spielberg walk onto the Oscar stage last night to present Christopher Nolan with his Best Director Academy Award made sense. Beyond the symbolic “passing of the torch” sentiment, Oppenheimer was the most predictable and unstoppable Oscar sweeper since Spielberg’s towering Holocaust epic Schindler’s List in 1994. In both years, you had the biggest “marquee director” in Hollywood overdelivering in terms of an acclaimed, buzzy and commercially successful “important and serious picture” that was so aggressively within the stereotypical Academy wheelhouse that voters had little choice but to give arguably overdue recognition.
Whether Oppenheimer was my favorite film of 2023 (#teamJohnWick4) or even my favorite Nolan film (cough-The Prestige-cough), its overall existence and reception made it frankly an all-too-proper victor. It was Christopher Nolan “finally” winning Oscars for what might be called the “most” Chris Nolan movie ever. It was also the first outright blockbuster Best Picture winner, with $327 million domestic and $960 million worldwide, since Peter Jackson’s $1.1 billion-grossing The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, which itself also seemed damn inevitable precisely 20 years ago. That added an ironic wrinkle to the evening.
Oppenheimer was the first Best Picture winner since The King’s Speech to earn even $425 million globally since the Lord of the Rings finale and just the fourth winner to top $300 million over the last 20 years. Covid circumstances notwithstanding, the previous $300 million-plus Best Picture winner was Green Book in 2019. The only reason it got to $320 million is because the film – which earned $85 million domestically – grossed a whopping $70 million in China. The other such victor over the last 20 years was Slumdog Millionaire, which earned a whopping $141 million domestic and $388 million worldwide as it cruised to victory in the controversial 2009 season.
Dark Knight getting snubbed led to more (and more varied) Best Picture nominees.
Why so controversial? Oh, right, because Nolan’s $1 billion-grossing and critically acclaimed superhero sequel/city politics epic The Dark Knight didn’t make the Best Picture line-up. The “snub,” in favor of frankly forgettable nominees like The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Milk, Frost/Nixon and The Reader (I’d argue that Danny Boyle’s thrilling and propulsive melodrama about a young Indian man reliving his life via a game show was that year’s old deserved nominated film), led to an expansion of the Best Picture line-up. Starting in 2010, we saw as many as ten possible contenders.
Honestly, I’d argue that the change was positive, even if, in theory, only five of the five to ten nominees each year were in any serious contention to win the big prize. For example, the first such year offered an eclectic mix of well-received populist crowdpleasers (The Blind Side, Up, Precious), critical darlings (The Hurt Locker, A Serious Man, An Education) and surprisingly good popcorn blockbusters (District 9, Avatar) and “prestige” films that still made money back when such a thing was still possible (Up in the Air, Inglorious Basterds). It was a pretty strong representation of “2009 at the movies.”
Whether I agreed with the worthiness of each film which ended up as a Best Picture contender, the last 15 years have offered a nice mix of conventional Oscar nominees (Lion, The Darkest Hour, 1917), alongside commercial winners that deserved to be noted as one of the year’s better movies (Inception, The Martian, Get Out, etc.) alongside aspirational indies that otherwise might have been too low-profile to make the cut (Winter’s Bone, Brooklyn, Call Me By Your Name, etc.). Hell, there are some years where I wonder if the eventual winner (The Hurt Locker, Moonlight, Parasite, etc.) would have even been nominated under the old “just five nominees” system, but that’s a different conversation. However, the 2010 season also began a run of exceptionally low-grossing (at least in North America) Best Picture winners.
A generation of cheaper, less commercially successful Best Picture winners
Katheryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker became the lowest-grossing Best Picture winner in modern times (pre-1964s) with just $12.6 million before its win. In 2017, Barry Jenkins’ groundbreaking Moonlight became the lowest-budgeted modern-day victor ($1.5 million) and, with $27 million domestic, the second-lowest grossing winner since In the Heat of the Night ($25 million in 1967 – which would be around $288 million adjusted for inflation).
Over the next 15 years, the majority of Best Picture winners would be comparatively smaller-grossing films like -- varying quality aside – The Artist ($45 million domestic and $128 million worldwide), Birdman ($42 million/$102million) and Spotlight ($45 million/$91 million). Yes, a film like The Silence of the Lambs earning $275 million worldwide in the early 1990s meant many more tickets sold than it would in the 2020s. Yes, 12 Years a Slave, for example, earning $56 million domestically and $181 million worldwide is terrific *for* 12 Years a Slave.
Blockbusters like Life of Pi, Gravity, Mad Max: Fury Road, Bohemian Rhapsody, Black Panther, Top Gun: Maverick and Barbie received Best Picture nominations, at least partially due to the goodwill related to their commercial success. However, the winners tended to be far lower-grossing and thus (in theaters) lesser-seen titles. The Best Picture winners of this current generation, especially in North America (Parasite cracked $253 million globally), have been less commercially successful.
Some of this is about what counts as aspirational. An overwhelming fantastical powerhouse like Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy was viewed in 2004 as a “Look what cinema can do.” triumph. As Hollywood became ever-more focused on the all-quadrants, global-targeted franchise-friendly action-fantasy tentpole, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II did not automatically qualify as aspirational. Instead, an R-rated political dramedy like Ben Affleck’s Argo, earning $227 million globally on a $44 million budget, was now aspirational. By 2019, an adult-skewing, star-driven crowdpleaser like Peter Farrelly’s critical and commercial hit Green Book qualified. That was especially true when pitted against Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma, a terrific coming-of-age melodrama that nonetheless (fairly or not) represented Netflix’s intent to kneecap the entire theatrical industry.
A swift change in what defines “mainstream” cinema.
That has coincided with a shift toward streaming for casual entertainment consumption. At least since the mid-2010s, fewer moviegoers have been going to theaters to see “just a movie.” Concurrently, a larger part of the theatrical spending has gone toward a smaller portion of event movies. In 2000, the top six earners accounted for 15% of domestic box office spending. By 2018, that figure was up to 26%, peaking at 41% in 2022. It dipped to 30% last year thanks to surprise breakouts like Five Nights at Freddy’s, Sound of Freedom and Taylor Swift: The ERAS Tour.
Nonetheless, the biggest movies of the year have, in two decades, doubled their overall share of the domestic theatrical pie. When pundits and commentators complain that the Oscars don’t nominate or award more populist films, that gives disingenuous credence to the (politically toxic) narrative that Hollywood is an insular cultural bubble that turns their noses at the films that audiences want to see. However, it wasn’t the pictures that changed, but rather a deluge of entertainment options amid more affordable at-home viewing opportunities that rendered what was once a mainstream theatrical movie a glorified niche flick or commercial coin toss.
Once upon a time, a gothic sci-fi fantasy romance between a young woman and a mysterious sea creature directed by the geeky weirdo who helmed Blade II would have been considered a mainstream commercial flick. Once upon a time, a Will Smith-starring biopic about the father of Serena and Venus Williams would have been a commercial slam dunk. In early 1996, Mr. Holland’s Opus could earn $83 million domestically. By the early 2020s, CODA was picked up by Apple and won Best Picture while on a streaming service that few general consumers watch.
The problem in 2022 wasn’t that the Academy was “out of touch” by not nominating Spider-Man: No Way Home for Best Picture (whose $1.91 billion success mainly was a matter of actor-specific contract negotiations), but rather that a Steven Spielberg-directed remake of West Side Story was no longer considered mainstream. This shift has coincided with and been partially caused by an upswing in geek-friendly franchise films partially personified by comic book superhero movies essentially taking over pop culture.
You’ve changed things forever. There’s no going back…
We all know the movie that kickstarted this industry-defining trend in the summer of 2008. Among its many other “deeper meanings,” Oppenheimer works as a parable for Christopher Nolan’s own “What have I done?” feelings over how The Dark Knight changed the world. The extent to which Nolan’s Batman Begins sequel reshaped the pop culture landscape, elevating geek-friendly franchise flicks to the top of the SEO-driven ecosystem and turning a generation of franchise-specific fans into gatekeepers, sore winners and champions of corporately owned IP over individual art and artists, turned him into a “death, destroyer of worlds.”
There is a bemusing irony, maybe a form of cosmic karma, in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer becoming the second Best Picture winner to top even $100 million domestic since Slumdog Millionaire. The other was Affleck’s $136 million-grossing Argo, winning in the year The Avengers finished what The Dark Knight started.
As Mark Harris wrote for Grantland in 2015, Birdman was “a movie about someone who hopes to create something as good as Boyhood,” a quote that explains the last decade of awards season melodrama. However, if Birdman was about the desire to create a piece of art as grand as Boyhood, then Oppenheimer is partially about creating a piece of mainstream commercial art like The Dark Knight that is so good and so popular that it tears apart the economic ecosystem that allows more outright art to be commercially possible.
Once upon a time, The Dark Knight was aspirational via being a blockbuster so damn good that it arguably deserved a slew of Oscars (and not just for the beloved actor who died prior to the film’s release). In 2024, Oppenheimer’s aspirational triumph is in being an Oscar-worthy drama that still achieved comparative blockbuster success.
That I’d argue the same thing about the third act of Ready Player One — in terms of a pioneering blockbuster director reckoning with the pop culture landscape he helped create — only adds to the pathos of last night’s events.
Is “mainstream” the new aspiration?
Fifteen years later, the biggest asses-in-seats movie star — a director no less — in the world delivered what looked on paper like the kind of film that no can no longer survive in an entertainment industry where audiences rarely show up for “just a movie” because they’d rather watch a ten-part streaming miniseries.
Oppenheimer came from Hollywood’s healthiest legacy studio, Universal, to become the highest-grossing straight-up drama ever in raw global grosses. It was a three-hour, R-rated “people talking in offices” historical biopic with no action or onscreen violence that earned $960 million worldwide amid a summer where preordained franchise flicks like The Flash and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny faltered. It ended, give or take, The King’s Speech surging past the $225 million-grossing The Social Network in 2011, a 15-year run of small-earning Best Picture winners that coincided with the expanded Best Picture slate caused by Nolan’s own “snubbed” comic book superhero blockbuster.
To be fair, the last decade or so has seen a slew of comparatively off-kilter Best Picture winners. Even aside from an expanded international Academy membership leading to some gains in terms of inclusive and diverse Oscar victories, recent Best Picture winners have included a pulpy economic inequity thriller from South Korea, a one-take (and sadly prescient) showbiz melodrama, a sci-fi melodrama where a woman fucks a fish creature and last season’s wild and exhausting (in a good way) multiverse fantasy. If the trade-off for lower-grossing hits is an Academy that more regularly rewards films like Moonlight over films like Greek Book, so be it.
Nonetheless, Oppenheimer is an audio-visual knockout (the first shot-on-Imax victor) from Hollywood’s most popular working director (who has aggressively championed theatrical exhibition as an essential artistic and commercial component for cinema) packed with good actors delivering meaty character turns. Despite not being a franchise play or an IP sell, it is the sixth-biggest global grosser of this decade and the third-biggest Best Picture winner behind Titanic and Return of the King. It also sold more domestic tickets than any Best Picture winner aside from those two since Gladiator ($187 million in 2000/$366 million adjusted). For Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, mainstream theatrical success is now among the ultimate aspirational milestones.