‘Oppenheimer’ es la bomb.
The Oscar gala confirmed the couple’s divorce from last summer and that it gave so much glory to movie theaters in times of scarcity. The film biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist to whom the atomic bomb is attributed, broke with ‘Barbie’, the big loser of the evening, taking home the loot of seven statuettes, the most important, and signifying the long-awaited consecration from director Christopher Nolan.
We have to talk about gala, but not about Oscar night. Given the time change in the United States and the advance of the ceremony, practically the entire event took place in Los Angeles with sunlight. That radiation melted ‘The Snow Society’, by Barcelona-born Juan Antonio Bayona, which fell just short of it, but with the good taste of popular success. He snatched the glory from ‘The Zone of Interest’, which also added the sound. Pablo Berger also had no luck with his ‘Robot Dreams’ compared to ‘The Boy and the Heron’, by the 83-year-old veteran Japanese animator Miyazaki, who returned from retirement to make this work.
Christopher Nolan broke his curse and won the Oscar for the first time with a double, best film and director. Cillian Murphy and Robert Downey Jr. were crowned leading and supporting actors, something that neither one nor the other had ever enjoyed. Oppenheimer’s other three awards were for soundtrack, editing and photography.
Nolan signed a super-successful film with audiences and critics, which also had general praise in the industry and professional colleagues. It raised nearly a billion dollars. But the box office is the only area in which he is surpassed by his advertising companion and his commercial promoter, whom he has abandoned at awards time.
The box office is the only consolation for Barbie, a film that became a social phenomenon, which left with the only recognition of the song ‘What was I made for’, by Billie Eilish and her brother Finneas. At 22 years old, Billie takes her second statuette, the youngest to achieve something like that.
‘Little Creatures’, by Yorgo Lanthinos, accumulated four distinctions, three of a more technical level (costume design, production design, and makeup and hairdressing) and the very relevant one for Emma Stone as best actress. Stone also starred in a dress tear just as she went on stage, from where she praised her competitor and friend Lily Gladston, the first Native American to aspire to that award. The supporting actress award went to Da’Vine Joy Randolph for her performance in Alexander Payne’s ‘The Holdovers’.
“For better or worse, we live in Oppenheimer’s world, so I want to dedicate this award to the promoters of peace,” Murphy stressed when collecting his distinction. The conflicts of the present were inside and outside the Dolby Theater, a true fenced and armored fortress. Despite the size of the perimeter, a pro-Palestine demonstration caused some guests (as part of the Bayonne delegation) to have access problems. The event started a few minutes late.
“Right now we are here as men who refute their Judaism and the Holocaust is being hijacked, an occupation that has brought many innocent people into conflict, whether they are victims of the October 7 attack on Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all victims. “This dehumanization, how do we resist it,” said Jonathan Glazer when hoarding the statuette for his film about the bourgeois and normal life of the family of the head of the Auschwitz concentration camp, from which only a wall separates them.
There was another very present war moment when Mstylav Chernov, the first Ukrainian to win an Oscar, collected the statuette as director of the documentary 20 Days in Mariupol. “I wish I had never made this film,” he said. “I would like to change this because Russia would never have attacked, would not have killed tens of thousands of Ukrainians, would never have occupied our cities. I cannot change history, but together we can ensure that this is recorded in the memory of history and the truth prevails,” he concluded.
From beyond, the evening featured Alexei Navalny, the opponent of Russian President Vladimir Putin who recently died. “The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing,” he proclaimed in the video that opened the segment dedicated to the memory of the deceased from the cinematographic world.
The best original script went to Cord Jefferson for ‘American Fiction’ and the adapted one to Justine Triet for ‘Anatomy of a Fall’. The evening had the originality of awarding ‘Godzilla’ the distinction for special effects and Dave Mullins for the animated short ‘War is over’, inspired by the music of John Lennon and Yoko Ono. On the most negative side, Martin Scorsese left empty-handed. He had ten nominations and made a zero. This is the third time this has happened, after ‘The Irishman’ and ‘Gangsters of New York’.
Despite its unquestionable success, the shock wave of the Oppenheimer bomb, with thirteen nominations, did not reach the Olympus of the most decorated. ‘The Lord of the Rings’, with its final trilogy of ‘The Return of the King’, by Peter Jackson, James Cameron with ‘Titanic’ and ‘Ben-Hur’, starring Charlton Heston and directed by William Wyler, occupy the top with eleven Oscars.
Oppenheimer had previously won the trio of producer, actor and screenwriter awards. It thus became the eleventh film to achieve this achievement and of all of them, only ‘Apollo 13’ failed to land at the Oscars.
This was the fourth gala hosted by Jimmy Kimmel. It started with a tribute to the union members who last year led the screenwriters’ and actors’ strike against the threat of artificial intelligence.
And almost at the end, he read a message from former President Donald Trump. “Has there ever been a worse presenter than Jimmy Kimmel?” wrote the current Republican candidate to return to the White House. He left more of his trademark niceties and asked that Kimmel be fired. The presenter, at the end of a reading full of irony, posed another question: “Shouldn’t you be in jail?”