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Oppenheimer won best film and six other awards at the 96th Academy Awards, giving Christopher Nolan his first Oscar as best director and Cillian Murphy his top actor award.
Nolan had been nominated five times as writer or director, but had never won. Emma Thomas, Nolan’s wife and producer of the film, accepted the award for best film.
“I could deny it, but I’ve been dreaming about this for so long,” Thomas said in his acceptance speech. “But it seems so unlikely that that could ever actually happen.”
Emma Stone won Best Actress for her role as Bella Baxter in Poor things, Yorgos Lanthimos’ adaptation of the story of a dead girl brought back to life by a mad scientist played by Willem Dafoe. The film won four awards.
Nolan’s three-hour biopic of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the inventor of the atomic bomb, was a critical and commercial success, grossing nearly $1 billion at the box office.
Nolan has built a dedicated fan base with films including his Batman trilogy and Startbut Oppenheimer’s fortunes were strengthened by the “Barbenheimer” rivalry. Barbie AND Oppenheimer they opened on the same weekend in July, leading hundreds of thousands of moviegoers to purchase tickets to see both.
Many fans felt Barbie, directed by Greta Gerwig and starring Margot Robbie, was snubbed by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences after neither woman received nominations. The film, which grossed $1.4 billion, won only one award, for best song, which went to Billie Eilish and her brother, Finneas O’Connell, for “What Was I Made For? “.
The awards ceremony at the Dolby Theater in Hollywood drew around 1,000 protesters opposed to Israel’s assault on Gaza, who gathered outside the event site. But the awards ceremony was relatively free of politics. Jonathan Glazer, director of The area of interestsaid those killed in Israel on October 7 and in Gaza were victims of “dehumanization” as he accepted the award for best international film.
The annual In Memoriam segment began with a clip of Alexei Navalny, the Russian activist who died in a prison camp last month. A documentary about Navalny won an Oscar last year.
This year the award for best documentary went to 20 days in Mariupolabout Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“This is the first Oscar in the history of Ukraine and I am honored,” said Mstyslav Chernov, the film’s director. “I’ll probably be the first director on this stage to say I wish I’d never made this movie, I wish I could trade this [for] Russia will never attack Ukraine.”
After several years in which the Oscars drew criticism for celebrating smaller films, this year featured a pair of blockbusters and works from big-name directors. Martin Scorsese’s The assassins of the Flower Moon received multiple nominations, including Best Picture, but came up empty.
This year’s awards covered films released during a difficult year for Hollywood, torn by months of strikes that will lead to a smaller slate of films this year.
Nonetheless, it was “a fantastic, eclectic year for cinema,” director Steven Spielberg said at the awards ceremony.