On 10 March 2024, at the 96th Academy Awards in Hollywood, Oppenheimer completed its run as the defining film of the year, winning seven Oscars including Best Picture and Best Director for Christopher Nolan. Cillian Murphy took best actor for his portrayal of J. Robert Oppenheimer, and Robert Downey Jr. won best supporting actor.
The ceremony crowned a year that had been dominated by the curious phenomenon of Barbenheimer, the double release of Barbie and Oppenheimer, which together packed cinemas and revived a movie industry still recovering from the pandemic and a bitter writers’ strike. Barbie, though nominated for eight awards, went home with only one, for best song.
Oppenheimer’s sweep, built on a story about the father of the atomic bomb and the moral weight of his creation, was a triumph for the kind of ambitious, adult, theatrical filmmaking that studios had increasingly abandoned. It was Nolan’s first Oscar, and it confirmed that a three-hour biopic about a physicist, of all things, could become both a box-office phenomenon and the centrepiece of the year in cinema.