Oppenheimer may be a movie about “the most important fucking thing that’s ever happened in the history of the world,” but by the time the 96th Academy Awards drew to a close, its crowning achievement already felt like an anticlimax. Standing center stage with the envelope for Best Picture, Al Pacino neglected to read out the names of the 10 nominees and cut right to the chase, so abruptly that it seemed to take the room a moment to realize that it was all over.
Like nearly all the ceremony’s major awards, Oppenheimer’s seven wins—for picture, director, actor, supporting actor, cinematography, editing, and score—were foregone conclusions. Emma Stone edging past Lily Gladstone in Best Actress was the night’s biggest surprise, not least to the show’s producers, who uncharacteristically slotted the award between Best Director and Best Picture in apparent anticipation of a historic win by Gladstone, who would have been the first Native American to triumph in any acting category. But Stone’s flamboyant, theatrical performance in Poor Things is exactly the kind that the Oscars tend to reward, and she’d been considered the favorite until losing to Gladstone at the Screen Actors Guild Awards two weeks back. So it’s hard to be shocked—although quite easy to be disappointed—at the academy favoring her over the quiet strength of Gladstone in Killers of the Flower Moon.
Instead of surprise, the show had spectacle, including a dazzling production number built around Barbie’s “I’m Just Ken,” performed by a pinked-out Ryan Gosling and several of the movie’s living dolls, with a guitar solo by Slash and, after Gosling and his microphone waded into the audience, backing vocals from Greta Gerwig, Margot Robbie, and America Ferrera—and Emma Stone. Each acting award was presented by five past winners in the category, who addressed each nominee in moments that were mostly touchingly personalized and occasionally blandly puffed-up. Like this year’s Emmys, which reconstructed vintage sitcom sets to bring the medium’s past alive, the cross-generation encomiums seemed designed to convey the sense of something larger than the awards themselves, a history enlarged with each new name added to the books.
Oppenheimer is explicitly a movie about history, about men concerned with how their actions will resonate in years to come—and yet who lack the foresight to fully grasp the consequences of their actions. With the benefit of hindsight, we feel the ominous foreshadowing of Robert Oppenheimer’s final words, as he suggests that the bomb he invented might one day “destroy the entire world,” but the chain reaction stops there. Nolan famously wrote parts of his script in the first person to indicate his allegiance to Oppenheimer’s subjective point of view, but seeing through his eyes alleviates us of the responsibility of using our own.
This year’s Oscar nominees were a bloody batch, from the (unseen) mass casualties of Oppenheimer’s A-bombs to the shattered skull of Anatomy of a Fall. (Poor Things, at least, is more interested in other bodily fluids.) But the winners tended to be those that kept that violence, or at least the responsibility for it, at a remove, whether shrouding it in ambiguity—Anatomy’s “Did She Do It?”—or displacing it through time and space. Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon is a notable exception, using its final moments to break through the veil of history and confront the audience with its own complicity, the decades in which Hollywood—including many of the directors Scorsese grew up idolizing—treated the extermination of the U.S. Indigenous population as a historical necessity and sometimes even a rousing spectacle. And for its trouble, it ended the night as the Oscars’ biggest loser, winning in none of its 10 nominated categories.
The Zone of Interest, which notched an expected victory in Best International Feature and a surprise win in Best Sound, keeps its characters at a physical remove as well as a historical one by shooting its Nazi protagonists with stationary cameras hidden around the set, denying the characters the close-ups that might tempt us to empathize with them. But as he accepted the award for international feature, director Jonathan Glazer insisted that it is a movie about now as much as then. “All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present,” he said, reading carefully from a printed speech, “not to say ‘Look what they did then,’ rather ‘Look what we do now.’ ” He and his producer James Wilson, he went on, “stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people—whether the victims of Oct. 7 in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization.”
Although several celebrities sported red cease-fire buttons on the red carpet, that would stand as the ceremony’s only other clear reference to the conflict. Cillian Murphy dedicated his Best Actor Oscar to “the peacemakers everywhere” but left the audience to imagine where exactly that was. Ramy Youssef used several early red-carpet interviews to call for a cease-fire, but the Oscars’ official pre-show limited the zone of inquiry to his upcoming gig hosting Saturday Night Live.
As if Killers going home empty-handed weren’t bad enough, Oscars host Jimmy Kimmel took an early shot at the film’s three-and-a-half-hour running time, glossing over how important that length is to conveying the oppressive weight of its systematic murder spree. But even Killers is easier to watch than 20 Days in Mariupol, the documentary whose account of Russia’s attack on the Ukrainian city features gory images of dead children and infants. “This is painful to watch,” says director Mstyslav Chernov, who shot the film while working as a video journalist for the Associated Press, “but it must be painful to watch.”
Mariupol won Best Documentary, an intriguing pick considering how the film’s skepticism about the power of its own images clashes with the Oscars’ historic triumphalism. As much as Chernov struggles desperately to transmit his footage via the region’s shaky infrastructure and pleads with editors to air the footage they have, he reflects, “We have seen so many dead people, dead children. How could more death change anything?”
Chernov seemed ambivalent about even accepting his award. “Probably I will be the first director on this stage to say I wish I would never have made this film,” he began. “I wish to be able to exchange this to Russia never attacking Ukraine, never occupying our cities. I wish to give all the recognition to Russia not killing tens of thousands of my fellow Ukrainians.” The Oscars tend to favor uplift, but it’s hard to muster much grounds for optimism when the subject of last year’s Oscar-winning documentary, Alexei Navalny, made a repeat appearance this year as the first face in the In Memoriam segment.
Oppenheimer is a dazzling cinematic achievement, a formally inventive and morally serious work that also features big explosions and made nearly a billion dollars—in short, a perfect combination of everything the movie industry likes to believe that it stands for. And yet, looking over the awards as a whole, it’s hard to escape the feeling that Oscar voters left themselves the tiniest of escape hatches, sternly judging slaughter at a distance while gracing the movies that follow its resonances into the present with little more than a perfunctory nod.
