This was an Oscars night with a British accent: so many Brits (and a supremely talented Irishman) strode up to the mic with their statuette, often baffling their Hollywood audience by talking about Mother’s Day (the Americans think that happens on 12 May). So it was fitting that the best picture was created by an Englishman, director Christopher Nolan.
Oppenheimer is the film whose awards-journey crescendo has happened to coincide with Vladimir Putin threatening to use nuclear weapons if Nato personnel are deployed in Ukraine – while releasing on Russian state TV taped evidence that British intelligence officers were deployed in Ukraine. Its relevance can hardly be doubted. Christopher Nolan’s monumental story of the A-bomb’s inventor, J Robert Oppenheimer, and his ecstatic anguish in giving humanity the means of its own destruction, got its predicted landslide with seven Oscars, including best film, best director and best actor for Cillian Murphy, whose fierce visionary stare and clenched intensity captivated Academy voters. Of the other Oscars it won, it seems fair incidentally to single out Jennifer Lame’s editing Oscar, an important part of the bold and counterintuitive narrative structure of Oppenheimer: its refusal to play by the usual biopic rules.
Robert Downey Jr got his much-anticipated best supporting actor Oscar for his pugnacious, glowering performance as Oppenheimer’s malign nemesis Lewis Strauss – a perfectly plausible choice, though I am a bit baffled at the consensus around this: for me, the four competitors, Robert De Niro, Sterling K Brown, Ryan Gosling and Mark Ruffalo, were stronger. But he gave a terrific speech. And I must be churlish enough to register my own reservations about the film generally: the strange fantasy-naked-sex moments in the middle of official hearings, and, yes, the absence of the Japanese viewpoint, especially as Oppenheimer did in fact visit Japan in 1960. But this was certainly a tribute to Nolan’s amazing ambition and appetite and invigorating seriousness, someone for whom big film-making is the only kind of film-making and that sheer scale is certainly part of what cinema needs to survive.
Emma Stone was the other big win of the night with the best actress Oscar for her theatrically mannered, exuberantly conceived and outrageous performance as the savant-innocent Bella Baxter in Yorgos Lanthimos’s neo-Victorian Poor Things, which got four Oscars. Her performance was a joy to watch, to be amused by, to be shocked by – a grotesque creation which was stratospherically over the top and yet also somehow subtle and fragile; it conveyed Stone’s natural gentleness, intelligence and charm.
Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest made history by being the first UK film to win the best international feature Oscar and also got best sound for Johnnie Burn’s nightmarish ambient sound design. This chillingly executed, eerily self-aware Holocaust movie with its Buñuelian high concept of being about the Auschwitz administrators’ bland and bourgeois home life, has been reinterpreted since its Cannes bow last May in the light of 7 October, the discourse homing in on complicit centrist enablers placidly going about their lives and indifferent to the horror of what is happening in the world outside their prosperous Zone of Uninterest. For some Gaza is the only relevant parallel; producer James Wilson’s complex, nuanced comments in the past on this have steered clear of the crass, longstanding Israel-equals-Nazis jibe; Jonathan Glazer’s acceptance speech was careful to balance the hostages of 7 October with the subsequent carnage.
It is of course freely based on Martin Amis’s 2014 novel The Zone of Interest, whose tone of black-comic horror residually survives in Jonathan Glazer’s film. I can very easily imagine Amis, had he lived, saying the film is actually about the blandly luxurious insulated lifestyle of Hamas leaders in their VIP Zone in Qatar, in their Doha hotels and private jets.
Complexity and genuine originality were rewarded in the best original screenplay category for Justine Triet and her partner Arthur Harari for their courtroom murder mystery Anatomy of a Fall, whose ambiguities and unanswered questions were not underlined and spoon-fed to the audience in the traditional Hollywood manner: its un-emphases were what baffled and enthralled audiences as much as any assumed openness in the ending. It was an utterly distinctive achievement. It really is a very original script. I was slightly more unsure about the Oscar for best adapted screenplay going to Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction, adapted from Percival Everett’s Erasure. It was a very entertaining and sprightly movie (and it’s sour to ask for more, perhaps) but it didn’t exactly match the novel’s metatextual effects.
Da’Vine Joy Randolph’s Oscar for best supporting actress was one of the evening’s many un-surprises for Alexander Payne’s 70s-set The Holdovers, a movie which has in fact provided Oscar season’s biggest and most unwelcome surprise: the story that the film has been accused of plagiarism. At all events, Randolph deserved her award for a deeply felt and richly sympathetic performance as the grieving, quietly dignified school cook whose son has died in Vietnam while the well-off white people have used the educational system to avoid military service for their sons.
So an Oscars with no real upsets, but resoundingly classy choices and the most interesting best picture list for years.
Read more about the 2024 Oscars:
• Here’s our news wrap and full list of winners – now read Peter Bradshaw’s verdict
• Al Pacino, British mothers and a codpiece envelope: the real winners and losers of the night
• Relive how the ceremony unfolded with our liveblog and get up to speed with the top viral moments and the best quotes of the night
• Have a gander at how the stars looked on the red carpet and at the show
