Why Oppenheimer Finally Won Best Picture For Christopher Nolan After He Failed With 3 Great Movies

Christopher Nolan has finally won the biggest Academy Award at the Oscars 2024, with Oppenheimer‘s Best Picture win accomplishing what his other great movies failed to do. The director has long been viewed as one of Hollywood’s biggest filmmakers, with his name alone becoming enough to transform a film into a theatrical event. Between the Dark Knight trilogy, original sci-fi films like Inception and Interstellar, and gripping true stories like Dunkirk, Christopher Nolan has had several worthy attempts to find his first Best Picture-winning movie. This made Oppenheimer‘s awards potential one of the biggest storylines for the 3-hour R-rated biopic.

The day Christopher Nolan has been waiting for has finally arrived, as Oppenheimer won Best Picture at the 2024 Oscars. He was thought to have a strong contender for a nomination, if not the potential winner, in 2009, but The Dark Knight was snubbed from Best Picture. Nolan finally got his first nomination in the category with Inception in 2011, but it was not until Dunkirk‘s nomination in 2018 that he re-entered the race. While there were merits for each of these excellent Christopher Nolan movies to win Best Picture, there are reasons why it did not happen until Oppenheimer.

Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer Dominated Awards Season & Was Loved By Voters

Some of the main reasons why Oppenheimer is Christopher Nolan’s first movie to win Best Picture at the Oscars are due to the overall success and narrative behind it. From the time that the first critic screenings for the movie happened, the film was positioned as the frontrunner. This was only cemented as awards season continued and Oppenheimer dominated when it came to winning the biggest prizes at each awards show. It took home the equivalent of Best Picture at the BAFTA Awards, Critics Choice Awards, Golden Globes, SAG Awards, PGA Awards, and National Board of Review.

The continued winning of Oppenheimer only further proved how much voters loved the movie. Nolan’s film was already incredibly successful thanks to its nearly $1 billion box office performance. It became a major sign for people in the industry and moviegoers that audiences are still interested in seeing movies that are not franchises or part of some IP – even if Christopher Nolan’s name itself is a massive draw. This helped entrench a narrative that Oppenheimer was worthy of being recognized at the Academy Awards.

It also helps that Oppenheimer never fell into any major controversies during awards season, while its biggest contenders either failed to make up enough ground or became more flawed upon further review. Movies like Poor Things, The Holdovers, Killers of the Flower Moon, or The Zone of Interest all could have potentially become Best Picture winners in a different year. But, it is difficult to overcome the narrative established in July 2023 that Oppenheimer deserved a Best Picture win when there was no considerable pushback to that idea. Instead, its favor with voters only grew stronger.

Oppenheimer Had The Necessary Nominations & Success To Win Best Picture

The other major factor behind Oppenheimer winning Best Picture is that the movie finally gave a Christopher Nolan movie the number of nominations that is typically needed. Oppenheimer received 13 Oscar nominations, the most of any 2023 release and the most for any Nolan movie. Previously, The Dark Knight received eight Oscar nominations even after missing Best Picture, where it won two, the biggest of which was Heath Ledger’s Best Supporting Actor victory. Inception then won four out of eight Oscar nominations, and Dunkirk won three out of eight nominations.

Getting the nominations ahead of the actual Academy Awards ceremony is one thing, but Oppenheimer had the right amount of victories in other categories to foreshadow this Best Picture win for Christopher Nolan. The acting wins for Cillian Murphy and Robert Downey Jr. were major points in the film’s favor, as too were winning for Best Editing, Best Cinematography, and more. Of course, Nolan winning his first Best Director Oscar also was a massive notch in Oppenheimer’s Best Picture belt. These wins were enough to establish how much the entire voting body supported it.

What Oppenheimer Did Better Than The Dark Knight, Inception & Dunkirk

Oscar nominations, campaign strategies, and other awards season arguments aside, Oppenheimer was always more likely to be Nolan’s Best Picture winner than The Dark Knight, Inception, or Dunkirk. These other three movies, while great, had some level of difficulty when it came to appealing to the “typical” Best Picture winner mold. The Dark Knight was a superhero movie, and Inception was a bold original sci-fi film that could confuse voters. While the Academy likes war movies, Dunkirk was not exactly the prototypical example of one. Meanwhile, Oppenheimer put Nolan’s usual style into a massive biopic, a genre voters love to reward.

There is also the reason that The Dark Knight, Inception, and Dunkirk all not winning Best Picture helped Oppenheimer’s case. There was so much backlash to The Dark Knight not even getting nominated that the Academy changed how many Best Picture nominees there would be. Inception and Dunkirk then losing made them part of the narrative that Nolan had paid his dues in Hollywood and that it was time to recognize one of his movies in this fashion. It is possible then that Oppenheimer‘s major night at the Oscars and winning Best Picture was only going to happen due to this history.