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In his films, Christopher Nolan loves to switch up a timeline.
The proceedings brought to mind those 90s ceremonies, when everyone knewThe English PatientandTitanicwere going to clean up.
Here, too, the ultimate outcome was rarely in doubt.
IfOppenheimerwere any more the industrys cup of tea, itd besitting in Christopher Nolans pocket.
Those suppositions were confirmed when the film swept through the precursors.
Everyone already gets it!
Recent seasons have been unkind to films that came into the fall with weighty expectations.
You had to be a lovable underdog, probably a dramedy with a big ensemble, likeCODA.
If you ended on a hug, likeGreen BookorEverything Everywhere All at Once, even better.
How didOppenheimerbreak this pattern, cruising through the season with nary a hint of backlash?
I think it came down to a few key factors.
1, obviously, is money.
The Oscars have a mixed relationship with blockbusters.
Being a box-office champion makes a contender feel like a winner, and that glow is contagious.
Grading on a curve, as most experts did,Oppenheimers achievement was by far the more impressive.
And the credit for that can go to our second reason: Nolan himself.
but that makes it no less real.
In Hollywood, Nolan stands out as a filmmaker whosa brand unto himself.
Like other major directors before him, Nolan had to wait for his moment.
2010sInceptionwould be a beneficiary of that decision, but that film and 2014sInterstellarwere primarily recognized as craft achievements.
But though it earned him his first Best Director nod, he was eventually steamrolled byThe Shape of Water.
It was Guillermo del Toros year, not his.
What made this Nolans time was the sense that, onOppenheimer, he really had raised his game.
For its fans within the Academy,Oppenheimerdeserved to be mentioned alongside the greats.
Nolan was never going to be del Toro, a cuddly charmer on the campaign trail.
But he did enough to cast aside the image of himself as a remote, professorial genius.
Krumholtz told a story about farting on set that he had probably told a thousand times.
Which brings me to the third reasonOppenheimerwas able to cruise through the season: Barbenheimer itself.
I have heard that, back in the summer, TeamOppenheimerwere not exactly pleased with the meme.
And then there was the money again.
But would that have been enough to make it a Best Picture slam dunk?
Oppenheimerbenefited from an accident of timing in another respect, too.
In a strange way, the overall strength of this years field helped, too.
One introduces chaos into a world of order, the other finds order hidden in the chaos.
Did something change two years ago?
If the Oscars were going to survive, they would need to embrace big, mainstream hits.
Not superhero movies (perish the thought), but films that were undoubtedly influenced by them.
Hows that for physics?
