Oppenheimer’s triumph, a stunning First Nations performance, and lots of sparkles: 5 experts on the 2024 Oscars

By Ari Mattes, University of Notre Dame Australia, Alison Cole, University of Sydney, Bronwyn Carlson, Macquarie University, Harriette Richards, RMIT University, Tom Clark, Victoria University

Like most biopics, Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer – which won seven awards, including the big one, Best Picture – seems kind of silly, an exercise in dress up. We watch “serious” actors like Robert Downey Jr. (who won Best Supporting Actor) and Cillian Murphy (Best Actor) go to extraordinary lengths to essentially imitate real life people, inevitably failing to be 100% true to life.

Similarly, the narrative – tracing the involvement of J. Robert Oppenheimer in the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb that would eventually devastate Hiroshima and Nagasaki – plods along in a way true story narratives often do.

There’s none of the precision and wit that often characterise genre films, their entanglement with questions of narrative and aesthetic form necessitated by their highly formulaic nature.

Yet Oppenheimer winning Best Picture is no travesty; in fact, it makes a lot of sense.

It works well as an engaging exercise in image and sound, a viscerally charged and hypnotic spectacle shimmering on the big screen shot in glorious 70mm film.

Typically for a Nolan film, it is pretentious and heavy-handed, and seems to think it is more important than it actually is. But as a fun romp through the 1950s – that perennially fetishished period in American cinema and culture – it works splendidly.

It was certainly not the best film nominated, nor the best film of 2023, but it does work as a piece of cinema.

There’s something refreshing about this fact alone: the Academy has eschewed the tedium of the usual didactic, message-driven cinema that has dominated recent years and have rewarded a technically and formally accomplished work, something that actually considers its medium and effectively works within it.

–Ari Mattes

On the red carpet: red pins and black gowns

Awards ceremonies are often taken as opportunities to make political statements through dress.

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