Best Picture – From The Dark Knight to Oppenheimer, Nolan’s Oscar Journey

We’re heading into the last gasp of this season’s endless Oscar race, with final voting starting in a couple of weeks (Feb 22). This is usually the time for big parties in Hollywood, specialty screenings with big celebrities, and behind-the-scenes campaigning. There is a sense that everyone is holding their collective breath, waiting to exhale, and wondering what this year’s winners will look like. What story will the Oscars tell about Hollywood in 2023?

The story of this year is likely to reflect that voters have recognized the damage they’ve caused by ignoring the free market, ignoring the domestic box office, and perhaps many Academy traditionalists will want to say, “We’re not going down without a fight.” In this case, voting for Oppenheimer will be like clamoring aboard the lifeboats as the Titanic is sinking. Maybe enough of them will, maybe they won’t.

There is no question that Christopher Nolan’s masterpiece Oppenheimer is the frontrunner. It should be the frontrunner, and it IS the frontrunner. Hopefully, that means frontrunner is a good way, not in a way that makes the industry feel backed into a corner like they did in 2021 when they were prepared to do anything they could not to recognize The Power of the Dog as Best Picture. Instead, they went for CODA, which had no Best Director nomination at the DGAs or the Oscars. It did give them what they wanted, though: that feeling of doing something GOOD with their vote.

In 2008, The Dark Knight was the biggest moneymaker of the year. It was a dazzling work that, for many, is still one of the best films ever made. But it was also the year of Heath Ledger’s untimely death. Somehow, his performance in The Dark Knight and the film being neglected by Oscar voters for Best Picture sent the entire awards-watching machine into a frenzy of madness, desperation, and despair.

How could this have happened, people like me screamed angrily. Even back then, I knew that there was a problem with the Oscars if they could not be bothered to choose the film that made the most money that year — especially when it was an outstanding cinematic achievement. Little did I know things in Hollywood were about to dramatically change.

Heath Ledger would win the Oscar for Supporting Actor posthumously, and the next year the Academy would expand its Best Picture category to ten from five because of the outrage over The Dark Knight.

But after they expanded the ballot, they found that a deeper problem had not been solved. They never opened their arms all that wide for genre movies. They carved a path for themselves when Hollywood made absurd amounts of money by going big, going international, and investing in franchise movies. And look at what that did. From Box Office Mojo in the post-expanded ballot era:

After the ballot was expanded, Oscar movies went one way, and Hollywood went another. That is to say, the studios made all their money — unimaginable profits — with IPs. By contrast, the Oscars mostly slipped into an elitist bubble — a “first-class section” of the airplane while the rest of the ticket-buying public was in “coach.” The Oscars stopped being about big money-makers for studios. A few Oscar winners did make money, but they essentially supported the indie circuit, which feeds off film festival culture. It’s an important market, but a niche market.

If you look at the worldwide box office of “top lifetime grosses” at Box Office Mojo (not adjusted for inflation), you’ll see that few Best Picture winners are even on it. There is Titanic (1997), Return of the King (2003), Forrest Gump (1994), and Gladiator (2000). Unless I’m missing one, that’s the whole thing.

Let’s look at Best Picture winners since then:

2022 — Everything Everywhere All Once — $77 million (worldwide: $143 million)
2021 — CODA — N/A (worldwide $2 million)
2020 — Nomadland –$3 million (worldwide: $39 million)
2019 — Parasite — $53 million (worldwide: $272 million)
2018 — Green Book –$85 million (worldwide: $321 million)
2017 — The Shape of Water –$63 million (worldwide: $196 million)
2016 — Moonlight — $28 million (worldwide: $65 million)
2015 — Spotlight — $45 million (worldwide: $98 million)
2014 — Birdman — $42 million (worldwide $103 million)
2013 — 12 Years a Slave — $56 million (worldwide: $188 million)
2012 — Argo $136 (worldwide: $232 million)
2011 — The Artist $88 million (worldwide: $133 million)
2010 — The King’s Speech $138 million (worldwide: $484 million)
2009 — The Hurt Locker $17 million (worldwide: $49 million)
2008 — Slumdog Millionaire $141 million (worldwide: $378 million)
2007 — No Country for Old Men $74 million (worldwide $171 million)
2006 — The Departed $132 million (worldwide: $291 million)
2005 — Crash $54 million (worldwide: $98 million)
2004 — Million Dollar Baby $100 million (worldwide: $285 million)
2003 — Return of the King $379 (worldwide: 1 billion)
2002 — Chicago $170 million (worldwide: $300 million)
2001 — A Beautiful Mind $170 million (worldwide: $332 million)
2000 — Gladiator $187 million (worldwide: $766 million)

This is how the chart looks:

The dark green is “worldwide,” and the light green is “domestic.”

The model for Hollywood’s bread-and-butter blockbusters has been to aim for international appeal, which is what has happened to the US economy at the hands of what we call “the establishment.” This is particularly true on the Left, meaning they tend to align with a more global community. The populists are attempting to wrestle control back toward nationalism. This isn’t just happening in the US. It’s happening in various countries throughout the world.

This transition has been far more destructive for Hollywood than anyone could have predicted.  It’s a much healthier country if everyone can participate in culture. It’s as simple as that. The Oscars should be in the business of remembering why they used to be such an important part of our culture and why they no longer are. In aiming their creative content at a global, rather than a domestic, audience, they have sacrificed their ratings at home, and no longer drive domestic box office.

This year, all of that could change if they embrace the blockbuster art movie that Oppenheimer is. I can make a case for Barbie, too, in this regard. But where Oppenheimer has the advantage over Barbie is in its wholly original storytelling. At heart, Nolan is still an indie director, the guy who made Memento. He has brought those avant-garde sensibilities with him, as Greta Gerwig has, on a larger scale. For Barbie, though, there is still a hurdle to clear — at its heart, it’s still a movie about a commercialized product. Oppenheimer is not.

Oppenheimer is a masterpiece because it is Nolan’s full spectrum of talent has come together in one movie. His cerebral sense of the natural world, time and space and science. It is his ongoing meditation on memory, on what stays with us and what we forget. It is about how his protagonists are often lost, and caught up in something they do not understand.

But what makes Oppenheimer THE film for 2024 is its subject. It’s not just the threat of nuclear war whispering in our ears every second of every day. It is also the threat of totalitarianism — what something like paranoia over Communist infiltration can do to a country, to scientists, to free thought. I have watched this take shape in this country, following much of the same trajectory as the Red Scare in the 1950s. I won’t go into it too much, except to say that Nolan’s film is more about our country right now than anyone who covers the Oscars or Hollywood seems to realize.

What obstacles stand in Oppenheimer’s way? Well, let’s say if the actors aren’t feeling it, they will go a different way. And after 25 years of this, nothing would surprise me, even their shunning of this brilliant, successful film.

The SAG Will Tell the Tale

If they really really love Oppenheimer it will win the SAG ensemble award. And it should. But remember, each win begins the story anew. The King’s Speech became the story after the PGA anointed it. 1917 won the Globe, the PGA, and the DGA, but lost at the SAG to Parasite.

It wasn’t even a case of Sam Mendes winning Best Director or Parasite winning Best Picture — it was a case of Bong Joon-Ho running away with the whole season. He did this not just with the movie itself but by dint of his own boundless enthusiasm. He was everywhere with a bemused smile on his face. He was incredibly charming and charismatic — and undoubtedly the man of the moment. Parasite’s win was partly the publicity that placed him at every party, big and small, knowing that his magnetic personality alone could win this thing.

Parasite stood out because it was a way to absolve the industry of everything that happened the year before. If the first “foreign language” movie couldn’t win with Roma, Parasite would accomplish that goal. In a year where most of the nominees in the major categories were white, the headlines the day after the Oscars would have been catastrophic. Instead, they were euphoric.

Parasite is a great movie, but as the Best Picture winner, it was an ominous sign that the Oscar voters were giving up on Hollywood. This year proves that it’s still true for many Academy members, as two international films landed nominations for Best Picture. This was mainly due to Hollywood’s lack of great films this year — but it’s also a credit to how good movies are in other countries.

Now, 15 years after the Oscars expanded their slate because of the snub of Nolan’s The Dark Knight, they can possibly roll back the stark divide between blockbusters and “Oscar movies,” with Nolan bringing it all back home.

Voting for Oppenheimer for actors, director, producers, designers is a way to say we’re not giving up our industry that has been a cornerstone of the American identity for 100 years. It says we can get over our need for something easier to understand and vote for something exceptional. It says yes, we hear you America. We hear you people all over the world who paid to see this movie over and over again. it says we will reward artists of high achievement and we understand that a gold statue still means something. We’re putting our word behind it and can be proud of our choice.

Will that happen? Well, put it this way. The fate of Best Picture has always rested on the collective shoulders of actors. Actors are not always reliable when it comes to picking the best film of the year. Sometimes they get it right, but most of the time they aren’t voting for the movie at all, but rather the performances in the movie. This has only been amplified in the era of the expanded ballot as we watched a decoupling of Best Picture and Best Director. But man, if they can’t get it up for a movie as momentous as Oppenheimer, then I have no words.