Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer Oscar Win Seems Unstoppable

Film fanboys all over the country are rejoicing. With Oppenheimer dominating the 96th Oscar nominations with a total count of 13 nods, everyone is expecting Christopher Nolan, one of this generation’s most defining filmmakers, to finally win his long-awaited statue for Best Director. The fact that he’s only been nominated a single time in the category, for Dunkirk, and failed to even make the lineup for both The Dark Knight and Inception is utterly ludicrous, as is the fact that he lost both of his previous nods in Screenplay (for Memento and Inception).

Even with a month and a half to go until the ceremony, things are not guaranteed, but all the odds seem to be tipped in Nolan’s favor this year. He won at both the Golden Globes and the Critics’ Choice Awards, and he captivated audiences worldwide with Oppenheimer, which became the highest-grossing biopic ever and the second-highest-grossing R-rated film ever. The only question remaining at this point is, how do his odds stack up with recent winners in the category?

The Recent Precedent for Best Director

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The trickiest prospect of judging the “best director” of the year is that the quality of the directing is almost always inextricable from the film’s quality itself. Sometimes, voters go with the filmmaker with the clearest overall vision for their work; sometimes, they pick the flashiest and most ostentatious directing on display (you could argue they pick “most” directing instead of “best” directing). But the defining constant within Oscar history is that, even though splits have become more common in recent years, the film that wins Best Picture almost always takes Best Director as well.

Within the last couple of decades, there have been a couple of noticeable trends in the category. First is that giant technical achievements often prove victorious (further proving the “best” equals “most” theory), especially if they’re for heavily visual-effects-driven films. This trend has been seen with victories for Ang Lee in 2012 for Life of Pi and Alfonso Cuaron for Gravity the following year; it’s not an accident that both films also received Oscars for Best Visual Effects. While 2019’s Parasite was nowhere near the scale of these blockbusters, it was clear that Bong Joon-ho had an utter command of his technical craft, which helped secure him his win.

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As is regularly the case with the acting categories, being considered overdue is another significant factor in securing a win. Directors like Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese were famously snubbed for years before they finally made their way to the Oscar stage (Scorsese notably was snubbed five previous times). Eventually, their contributions to filmmaking became increasingly impossible to ignore. A crowning achievement like Schindler’s List was the perfect way to finally recognize Spielberg’s genius, and while The Departed arguably doesn’t equal Scorsese’s best works, it was more than evident by then that the fact that he didn’t have an Oscar was ridiculous.

All of these factors seem to suggest the odds will be in Nolan’s favor come March. Oppenheimer is an undeniable technical achievement; it’s expected to dominate the craft categories this year, and Nolan himself is widely considered overdue, having five previous nods and no wins. Oppenheimer, one of the best films of his career, would be the perfect film to give him his industry recognition.

Can Nolan Still Lose the Best Director Oscar?

Of course, being the frontrunner this early is never a guarantee of a win. While it’s more notable in Best Picture, “frontrunner fatigue” is also not unprecedented in the Director category; in 2019, Sam Mendes won almost all major precursors for 1917 and seemed unstoppable before losing to Bong Joon-ho. Perhaps most (in)famously, David Fincher looked guaranteed to emerge victorious and arguably should have won Best Picture for his career-best work in The Social Network until Tom Hooper took the prize for The King’s Speech.

So the question is, if Nolan doesn’t win, who could instead? There are two likely candidates. First is Martin Scorsese, whose Killers of the Flower Moon was a similar critical favorite to Oppenheimer. Its critique of white supremacy and dedication to centering its Native American characters in their own story also arguably make it a more important film. One can still argue that Scorsese, maybe the greatest living filmmaker, should have more than one Oscar win. That being said, winning twice in the Director is often a longshot unless the work is undeniable, and it doesn’t seem like there’s a mad rush within the industry to award Scorsese again.

The other, and slightly more likely possibility, is Yorgos Lanthimos for Poor Things. His film did almost as well as Oppenheimer on nomination morning, securing eleven nods, and it seems as though it will be a competitive contender in the technical categories. While Lanthimos has always been an acquired taste as a director, with Poor Things, he created the kind of bizarre, visionary work that also happened to be his most accessible and crowd-pleasing. This combination was a large part of what helped Guillermo De Toro win in 2017 for The Shape of Water. Nonetheless, he still doesn’t feel as undeniable a candidate as Nolan.

Regardless, we’ll have a better feel for the state of the race on Feb. 10, when the Directors Guild of America holds their annual ceremony, and they may be just as reliable an indicator as the Golden Globes. In 75 years of their existence, they’ve only failed to coincide with the Oscar winners eight times.

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Christopher Nolan at Least Feels Unstoppable

At the moment, however, nearly everything is going in Oppenheimer‘s favor. It’s the kind of technical and artistic achievement that the industry clearly adores, and it’s been dominating awards shows like the Golden Globes and Critics’ Choice Awards. Considering how overdue Nolan has been, arguably since The Dark Knight, that only makes his odds of finally winning look increasingly strong. It’s never a guarantee, but as of right now, Nolan’s chances of losing the Oscar appear to be near zero. Oppenheimer is finally heading to streaming next month, arriving on Peacock on Feb. 16.

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