Is Oppenheimer Really the Best Film Of 2023 or Did the Oscar Go to The Wrong Title?
Christopher Nolan finally won his first Oscar as a director for Oppenheimer; he saw his first work win the most coveted statuette of the Academy Awards: that of Best Film. The Oscar for Best Film every year tells which is the title which, in the opinion of those who make cinema in Los Angeles and the surrounding area, has most incisively marked the past year of cinema. As is known, the Academy Awards are assigned by an organization that gives voting rights to several thousand people who work, in various capacities, in the film industry, with a clear prevalence of US members who gravitate around Hollywood. It is therefore worth analyzing this choice, asking ourselves why it was made, what it tells us, and above all whether it is deserved.
Oppenheimer is Undoubtedly One of the Best Films of 2023
Let’s start with the last question, which is the easiest to answer: yes, Oppenheimer is one of the great films of the year, a victory that is rationally difficult to argue against. 2023 was a year of excellent quality cinema in and around Hollywood, but also in Europe. An excellent year summed up well by the Oscars during the nomination phase: the Academy’s choices were very far-sighted. It can be argued that Oppenheimer is not the best film of the last 12 months, of course, but its quality is so high, its cinematographic contribution is so solid that it does not lend itself to any kind of criticism regarding its quality, which makes of this film already an excellent choice.
Oppenheimer is a winning film in ways that appeal not only to Hollywood artists but also to the entire US film industry. It has been many years since a national and international box office champion won this statuette. Oppenheimer is a very successful film also in a commercial sense, attesting among other things to the excellent work that Universal is doing at a production level, as a studio that brings films with different ambitions and budgets to the cinema, rarely giving in to the fashions of the moment but with a defined, solid, strong industrial line. Warner Bros is not having a good time however and the fact that Nolan has achieved this objective after ending a long collaboration with the studio, after feeling betrayed by how the previous Tenet was distributed in theaters and on streaming, should lead to many internal reflections.
For the very health of the Oscars intended as a reference award for the world of cinema, however, the victory of such a popular film is a panacea. After years in which indie, lesser-known, or very niche films prevailed, this victory makes a large number of casual spectators feel part of the discussion relating to the Oscars, who can therefore comment the morning after the ceremony because they saw it at the cinema. The most gratifying aspect of Oppenheimer is that it is an extremely popular and mainstream film without being a film that makes concessions downwards, that gives up its authorship and its complexity to attract the public to the theater. One of Christopher Nolan‘s great merits, which earned him those two important statuettes, is that he was able to convince the public that it was necessary to go to the theater, even in the face of a three-hour-long film full of dialogues on quantum physics, complex scientific, political and bureaucratic evaluations.
Nolan Returns to Live Up to His Impact on the Public
It’s not for everyone, on the contrary: over the years, Nolan’s uniqueness as director and creator has been expressed precisely in his ability to keep alive a sort of pact with the public, always present in the theater based on a relationship of trust. The tickets sold and the proceeds generated have allowed Nolan to aim ever higher, to convince the studios to finance very expensive and far-from-certain blockbusters. Tenet in this sense represented an impasse, a stumble certainly due to the difficulty of renewing that pact amid the pandemic, but also to a film that, starting from enormous complexity, deviated to the point of being convoluted. Warner’s lack of confidence and Universal’s willingness to remain alongside Nolan did the rest.
However, it is interesting to note with which film Nolan achieved this goal. Although Oppenheimer is a “difficult” film in the media narrative, breaking down its various elements shows that it is one of the most traditional and elementary films Nolan has ever shot. First of all, it trades science for science fiction, a genre notoriously disliked by the Academy. The timelines are not presented in chronological order but are infinitely more immediate than the loops and ellipses that characterize late Nolian cinema. Oppenheimer is not his first historical war film, but it is much more traditional and Oscar-friendly than Dunkirk attempted.
First of all, Dunkirk tells a story of English misery and heroism, a historical event seen from the British perspective, even if contiguous to the direct involvement of the United States in the Second World War on the European scene. Oppenheimer, on the other hand, is an intrinsically American film in terms of setting, mentality, and psychological investigation, complete with the Stars and Stripes flag flying at El Alamo. Both films tell of the key moments of the conflict, but also the mentality and soul of the Allies on both sides of the Atlantic. Oppenheimer is, therefore, more American (which doesn’t hurt, on the contrary), but also more traditional in approach. Unlike a collective and quite depersonalized film like Dunkirk – an episodic film, made up of crowds, faces that are barely distinguishable from each other, and simple soldiers in the mud – Oppenheimer is the triumph of American individualism.
Like the most traditional of biopics, it tells of a rise and a fall and puts at the center a brilliant and, both for strengths and weaknesses, an exceptional man. Nolan uses this basic grammar of the biopic to derive a very complex tale, but that sense of familiarity with a conceptual structure seen and assimilated dozens of times remains. Around the protagonist, there is then an American society whose negative sides are embodied by bureaucracy and government structures, while the best is characterized by professional and human relationships, by freedom contrasted with the oppression of Nazism and Communism, by the cultural melting pot that becomes creative fuel for solving the mathematical, physical and logistical problems related to the H-bomb.
Unfortunately, the current historical context has also suddenly made the war scenario of the film less dusty, reminding us that we still live in the era begun by Oppenheimer and his development of the atomic bomb. On the historical side, Nolan has once again returned to exercising his proverbial perfectionism, translated into a 1:1 reconstruction of the live sets, in the sound almost always captured live, in the monumental work of those around him who have found creative solutions to portray the bomb starting from images captured from life without having to drop one.
Oppenheimer is the State of Cinematographic art Achieved by a Working Group
The fact that Oppenheimer won 7 Oscars also raises another fact: Nolan was able to make a difference for his team too, surrounding himself with excellent professionals and leading them to victory too. This is particularly evident in the careers of Cillian Murphy and Robert Downey Jr.: the first is an interpreter born from Nolan’s youth who made the most of the great opportunity that the director and friend offered him. The second chose Nolan’s film to send the message that a new phase of his post-Marvel career had begun, one in which he wanted to be taken seriously.
The same can be said for the young composer Ludwig Göransson or the director of photography Hoyte van Hoytema. If Oppenheimer won the statuette as best film it is also because Universal provided Nolan with the budget necessary to surround himself with the professionals he preferred, putting them in a position to work at their best and do such a memorable job that they too reached the finish line of the statuette. Oppenheimer is therefore a film of the highest quality and in some ways much less indigestible to the Academy’s tastes than a science fiction work. However, it is also a film that sees an evolution and progression in Nolan’s film history.
One of the weak points of his cinema, for example, has always been the lack of incisiveness of the female characters, combined with a cold, rational approach. Although not central to the story, the characters of Emily Blunt and Florence Pugh are much more assertive than the typical women in Nolan’s films. Thanks to the historical evidence, Here Nolan launched himself into the exploration of the contradictory intimacy of his protagonist, with some nudity and a much-debated explicit scene, contested by some. Personally, however, I find that Oppenheimer is so incisive also because Nolan here often experiments in territories that his cinema had previously deserted. He takes risks and almost everyone pays off.
