Nolan’s three-hour epic is the most commercially successful best picture winner since Peter Jackson’s “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King,” released in 2003. In recent years, the film academy’s voters have handed the best picture prize to comparatively small-scale projects such as “CODA,” “Nomadland,” “Moonlight” and “Spotlight.”
This year’s other best picture contenders were Cord Jefferson’s “American Fiction,” Justine Triet’s “Anatomy of a Fall,” Alexander Payne’s “The Holdovers,” Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon,” Bradley Cooper’s “Maestro,” Celine Song’s “Past Lives,” Yorgos Lanthimos’ “Poor Things” and Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest.”
“Oppenheimer” revolves around J. Robert Oppenheimer’s development of the atomic bomb during World War II. The film also chronicles Oppenheimer’s tense relationship with bureaucrat Lewis Strauss (Downey), who engineered a push to remove Oppenheimer’s postwar security clearance during the McCarthy era.
Nolan wrote the script, adapting it from the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” written by the historians Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. The film, like the book, depicts the physicist as a scientific genius who later felt deeply conflicted about his destructive invention.
The movie’s sprawling ensemble cast includes Emily Blunt (in an Oscar-nominated supporting role), Florence Pugh, Matt Damon, Josh Hartnett, Casey Affleck, Benny Safdie, Jason Clarke, Rami Malek and Kenneth Branagh. (The cast was recognized with the top honors at the 30th Screen Actors Guild Awards.)
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
