‘We don’t like him’: the Academy has it in for Christopher Nolan but he’ll have the last laugh
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The Golden Globes going gaga for quantum physics can’t have been on many film lovers’ bingo cards, but Christopher Nolan has a knack for turning conventional Hollywood wisdom on its head. Last night, at what is widely regarded as the most frivolous stop on the the awards season route map, Nolan’s atomic epic Oppenheimer was the trophy-grabbing juggernaut no-one quite saw coming, roughly six months after it became perhaps the unlikeliest summer blockbuster since the form was invented.
At the 2024 ceremony, Oppenheimer made good on five of its eight nominations: Best Motion Picture – Drama, Best Actor – Drama for Cillian Murphy, Best Supporting Actor for Robert Downey Jr, Best Director for Nolan himself, and Best Original Score. Meanwhile its great box-office rival-slash-ally Barbie converted just two of its nine nominations into wins, for Best Song and (a new addition for the 2024 ceremony) Juiciest Balance Sheet, officially known as Best Motion Picture – Cinematic and Box Office Achievement.
A huge cultural as well as commercial force last summer, Barbie might have reasonably hoped for more. But in both the Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy and Best Actress – Musical or Comedy races, it was pipped by Yorgos Lanthimos’s eccentric period romp Poor Things, which opens in the UK this Friday, and seems unlikely (its total brilliance notwithstanding) of matching Greta Gerwig’s bright pink satirical fantasia at the box office. Perhaps the Globes’ newly expanded membership, which tripled in size as part of the organisation’s recent diversity crusade, has made them a more adventurous bunch.
If so, Nolan and his collaborators have certainly seen the benefit, with Oppenheimer now roaring to the front of the 2024 awards season pack. There is no overlap between the Globes’ band of 300 or so international show-business journalists and Bafta and the Academy’s far larger bodies of film industry professionals. But over the last decade, their tastes have lined up reasonably often: four of the last 10 Best Picture Oscar winners, and eight of the Bafta Best Film winners, all took home the equivalent Globe first. (Admittedly, the fact that the Globes choose two best motion pictures per year bumps up their success rate a bit.)
Naturally, this means an Oppenheimer streak feels a lot likelier than it did a little over 24 hours ago. The film was beloved by audiences and raved about by reviewers, but 21st century Oscar and Bafta voters are a very different breed from both, and either can’t or won’t be led by popular or critical taste. Nolan may be the highest profile victim of their truculence: his 12 films to date have collectively made almost £5 billion worldwide, and despite their popularity all feel like the work of a totally singular mind. Yet in 35 years of writing and directing, the number of Baftas and Oscars he has actually won stands at nil.
He has accrued 10 nominations over the years – mostly for Inception and Dunkirk, though the American Academy also saw fit to throw him a Best Original Screenplay nod for Memento in 2002. But the lack of recognition has, at times, been manifestly absurd, and the public outcry following The Dark Knight’s absence from the Oscars’ Best Picture shortlist in 2009 was what led to the category being expanded in the following years.
So what was the problem? Nolan has never looked especially comfortable with the campaigning process, and tends to deflect questions about how he views the whole process, saying the measure of success that matters most is the reaction of his audience. But the ambivalence cuts both ways – and in the past, it’s been hard not to sense a certain spikiness from the Americans particularly when weighing Nolan’s chances in any given year’s race.
Perhaps their problem is he just doesn’t need them. Since the earliest days of his career, Nolan has been able to raise money for the most complex and often baffling personal projects, with no glittery badge of endorsement from his peers required. He and his wife and producing partner Emma Thomas are known for being able to thrash out the most outlandish film pitches like sober business proposals, as whirringly well-constructed as any of his plots. How on earth else could you show up at Warner Bros with an idea for an original ensemble heist film set in a series of interlocking dreams, with zero franchise or action figure potential, and walk away with creative carte blanche and a $160m cheque? (That would be Inception.)
Perhaps it’s no wonder that others in the business have historically seethed over this. “We don’t like him,” an Academy member once hissed at me when I asked why on earth his lot hadn’t rallied behind Dunkirk in 2019, before grumbling that he wasn’t enough of a game-player to win their favour.
But the Nolan who took to the stage at the Beverly Hilton ballroom on Sunday night, and who last week was telling anecdotes about his Peloton coach slagging off Tenet, was gracious, clubbable and self-effacing: an archetypal good winner as well as a worthy one. Oppenheimer’s small army of awards PRs will be hoping voters elsewhere will have noticed, and finally give him the recognition he may not have previously sought, but has long deserved.
