Oppenheimer and la bomba.
The Oscars gala confirmed, on Monday morning, at the notary of the Dolby Theater in Los Angeles, the divorce of the couple from last summer, dubbed as Barbenheimer, who brought so much glory to the movie theaters at the time of ‘scarcity. The film biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist to whom the atomic bomb is attributed, broke with Barbie, the big loser, took the spoils of seven statuettes, the most important ones, and represented the long-awaited consecration of the director Christopher Nolan.
It is necessary to talk about the gala, but not about the night of the Oscars. Due to the time difference in the United States and the advance of the ceremony, practically the entire event took place in sunlight. That radiation melted La sociedad de la nieve, by Barcelona’s Juan Antonio Bayona, which remained at the gates, but with the good taste of the popular success achieved. He snatched the glory The area of ??interest which, in addition, added the sound award.
Pablo Berger also had no luck with Robot dreams against The Boy and the Magpie by the 83-year-old veteran Japanese master Miyazaki, who returned from retirement to make this work.
Christopher Nolan broke the curse and won the Oscar for the first time with a double, best film and director. Cillian Murphy and Robert Downey Jr. they were also crowned as leading and supporting actors, something neither of them had ever enjoyed. Oppenheimer’s other three awards were for the soundtrack, editing and photography.
Nolan signed a successful film with audiences and critics, with the praise of the industry and colleagues. It raised close to a billion dollars. But the box office is the only area in which it is surpassed by its partner in advertising tasks and main commercial driver. He benefited from the label and then abandoned the doll.
The box office is the real 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 the age of 22, Billie wins the second statuette, a milestone.
In favor of Nolan, it played, as Justin Chang points out in The New Yorker, that Oppenheimer’s success is due to the fact that it is a “masterful drama”, but it was also influenced by “the doctrine of debt” that ‘Academia had contracted with the solvent director, but postponed.
And there are those who believe that the main reason for Barbenheimer’s divorce is not the lack of seriousness of the film that some allege, but that “a lot of academics were upset because they thought they were being evaded”, says Devin Gordon in The Atlantic. He suspects that a part of the industry “had silently hated this attack on the patriarchy”. Therefore, they decided: “Barbie, stay in the box”.
Pobres criaturas, by Iorgos Lànthimos, collected four distinctions, three in the more technical field (costume design, production and make-up and hairdressing) and the very relevant one for Emma Stone as best actress. Stone also staged a dress break on stage, from where she praised competitor and friend Lily Gladstone, the first Native American to aspire to the award. The supporting actress statuette went to Da’Vine Joy Randolph for her performance in Los que se quedan
“For better or for worse, we live in Oppenheimer’s world, so I want to dedicate this award to the promoters of peace,” remarked Murphy when he collected the distinction. The conflicts of the present were inside and outside the Dolby, a veritable closed and armored fortress. Despite the breadth of the perimeter, a pro-Palestinian demonstration caused some guests (part of the Bayonne entourage) to have problems entering the theater. The event started minutes late.
“We are here now as men who refuse to have their Judaism and the Holocaust hijacked by an occupation that has made many innocent victims, whether they are victims of the October 7 attack in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza. This dehumanization, how do we resist it?” said Jonathan Glazer, who treasured the distinction for his film about the bourgeois life of the family of the head of the Auschwitz concentration camp, separated only by a wall.
There was another very recent wartime moment when Mstislav Chernov, the first Ukrainian to win an Oscar, collected the statuette as the director of the documentary 20 Days in Mariupol. “I wish I had never made this film”, he said. “I would like to change this so that Russia would never have attacked, would never have killed tens of thousands of Ukrainians, would never have occupied our cities. I can’t change history, but together we can make sure this goes down in history and the truth prevails,” he said.
From the beyond, the evening featured Aleksei Navalny, the opponent of Russian President Vladimir Putin who died recently. “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 in the world of cinema.
The best original screenplay 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 giving a film from the Godzilla saga the distinction of special effects and Dave Mullins for the short animation War is over inspired by the music of John Lennon and Yoko Ono.
Instead, Wes Anderson planted them. Another forgotten after eight nominations, he was absent when he won his first statuette for the short film The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, an adaptation of a story by Roald Dahl. On the downside, Martin Scorsese walked away with nothing. He had ten nominations and made zero. It’s the third time he’s been there, after The Irishman and Gangs of New York.
Despite the unquestionable success wherever it happened, the expansive 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 directed by William Wyler, occupy the top with eleven Oscars.
It was the fourth gala presented by Jimmy Kimmel. It began with a tribute to the trade unionists who led the screenwriters’ and actors’ strike last year. And almost at the end he read a message from former President Donald Trump in real time. “Has there ever been a worse host than Jimmy Kimmel?” the Republican White House hopeful wrote to X today. The host, when he finished the ironic reading, posed another question: “You shouldn’t be in prison?”.
This criminal case is America’s great documentary.
