The Dark Knight was absolutely snubbed for a Best Picture nomination back in 2009, but oh well, at least the Academy Awards wised up on Christopher Nolan. On Sunday night, the purveyor of big-screen entertainment finally won his Oscar for directing the hell out of Oppenheimer. The biopic, which picked up awards throughout the night, was well-positioned going into the ceremony while Nolan’s directing win was anticipated by fans and awards prognosticators alike. But the win was a long time coming for a director who has gone surprisingly overlooked by the industry.
Nolan’s win comes off a past that includes a scant number of nominations and zero previous wins. The filmmaker was first nominated alongside his brother — and future Fallout TV director — Jonathan Nolan for their work on Memento. The duo lost to Julian Fellows for Gosford Park.
Hollywood was abuzz in 2008 under the assumption that The Dark Knight would not only earn the director an accolade but break into the Best Picture top five, shattering a belief that superhero stories had no place in the prestigious annals of Oscar history. But it didn’t happen. The Oscars would immediately remake itself in order to never whiff that hard again.
2011’s Inception put Nolan back in the awards conversation, landing him nominations for Best Screenplay and Picture. But still, no love for direction. The man crashed a train through a city street – what more did these people want?! The answer was war movies; Nolan’s lean, mean WWII thriller Dunkirk scored him a spot at the director’s table, alongside, Guillermo del toro (The Shape of Water), Greta Gerwig (Lady Bird), Jordan Peele (Get Out), and Paul Thomas Anderson (Phantom Thread). Del Toro took home the prize, but Nolan’s time would come just a few years later.
“Movies are just over 100 years old,” he said in his acceptance speech for Oppenheimer. “I imagine like being 100 years into painting of theater, we don’t know where that incredible journey is going from here, but to know you think that I am a meaningful part of it means the world to me.”
Nolan arrives to his Oppenheimer moment not just as an accomplished filmmaker, but as a vocal industry leader for the theatrical experience, shooting on celluloid, blowing things up in real life, projecting on IMAX, and how much it sucked when Warner Bros. put all of its movies on HBO Max for an entire year. He has ruffled feathers over the years and rarely pandered, which may be the reason it took so long for him to score at the personality-driven Academy Awards. But that commitment to the craft created a cult of personality around him that has gone far beyond the usual film nerd community; during a summer of blockbusters, more people will show up for his three-hour historical biopic than the umpteenth Transformers movie. His Oscar win is a win for artists grappling with a business that seems to prefer more… artificial intelligence.
If The Dark Knight upended expectations, maybe Nolan’s win for Oppenheimer will have a similar effect. As the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences scrambles to figure out how to lure more young folk to the Oscars telecast each year — remember when we almost got a Most Popular category? — and the movie studios sift through their IP file bins for anything toyetic they can throw $200 million at, the solution to the entertainment industry’s many woes seems to be staring everyone in the face.
Nolan just won an Oscar to doing whatever his heart desired. Imagine if more people got the chance?
