Nolan’s complex epic won best picture, best director, best actor and best supporting actor – but awards for The Zone of Interest, Poor Things and The Holdovers show they could still cause upsets on Oscar night
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So Christopher Nolan’s huge, complex, anti-narrative epic Oppenheimer continued to deliver its payload of seriousness at the Baftas; it gained best picture, best director for Christopher Nolan and best actor for Cillian Murphy for his stunningly intuitive performance as the tortured J Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the A-bomb, with his sightless stare of horror – as if foreseeing humanity’s end – the man whose non-aligned leftist principles drove him to develop the bomb before the Nazis, the same principles which made him a pariah in red-scare America after the war.
Nolan structured his movie in such a way as to bring these concepts into alignment, moving back and forth in time. It was an artistic gamble that paid off. Robert Downey Jr also got his best supporting actor Bafta for Oppenheimer’s nemesis Lewis Strauss – although I would have preferred Paul Mescal or Robert De Niro.
