[COLUMN] Oppenheimer's Awards Sweep is a Reminder That Film is a Collaborative Medium | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

When Al Pacino made his way to the front of the stage to announce the winner of the Best Picture at the Academy Awards, he avoided the traditional framing of “and the Oscar goes to…” Instead, opening the envelope, he simply declared, “My eyes see Oppenheimer.”

To be fair, the Oscars shared the love around this year. Most of the Best Picture nominees took home at least one major trophy: The Zone of Interest won Best Sound and Best International Feature, American Fiction won Best Adapted Screenplay, Anatomy of a Fall won Best Original Screenplay, The Holdovers won Best Supporting Actress, and Barbie won Best Original Song. Poor Things claimed four statues, including Best Actress. Only Maestro, Past Lives, and Killers of the Flower Moon went home empty-handed.

However, the Academy Awards this year were less a competition than a coronation. Heading into awards season, Christopher Nolan and Oppenheimer were overwhelming favorites to take home the big praise. Had Pacino read The Holdovers or The Zone of Interest, it would have been an upset for the ages. Like Steven Spielberg winning with Schindler’s List or Martin Scorsese winning with The Departed, there was a sense that Nolan was due and that Oppenheimer would deliver.

There was a certain poetry in this. Fifteen years earlier, Nolan had changed the Oscars without even being nominated. In 2009, the Academy’s decision to nominate The Reader over either The Dark Knight or Wall-E sparked an existential crisis. It had led to the expansion of the Best Picture field from five to ten nominees, in what became known as “the Dark Knight rule.” The voting process also changed, with the Best Picture shifting to a more populist preferential ballot system.

More broadly, the Academy spent the next few years expanding and diversifying its membership, recruiting younger members. This push would become even more pronounced in the years that followed, with scandals such as #OscarsSoWhite. This changed the kind of films that could be nominated for – and which could win – the Best Picture Oscar, paving the way for bold choices like Parasite or Everything Everywhere All At Once.

As such, Oppenheimer’s victory feels like a full-circle moment. If nothing else, it cements Nolan as perhaps the most important director working in mainstream cinema. He collected his Best Director Oscar from Steven Spielberg, recalling how Martin Scorsese claimed his long-overdue statue from his buddies and contemporaries Spielberg, George Lucas, and Francis Ford Coppola. In an era defined by intellectual property, Nolan is the rare director whose name means something to general audiences.

There is a tendency to get swept in the myth of the auteur, to reduce this discussion of individual artists to empty hero worship. Inevitably, a cult of personality develops around these sorts of singular filmmakers, often metastasizing into legend. There is no denying that Nolan is a writer and director with a very strong creative perspective, stylistic sensibility, and general aesthetic. His films are his own, belonging to a larger body of work in which one may derive meaning or context.

However, Nolan is also a collaborator by nature. He is a filmmaker who tends to work consistently with talented individuals that he trusts, developing long-term relationships that inevitably inform and shape the work itself. This is why it is so important that Oppenheimer didn’t just take home Best Director and Best Picture, but instead won seven of the thirteen categories in which it was competing. Oppenheimer was not just a victory for Nolan, it was a victory for his team.

This is perhaps most obvious with Cillian Murphy’s victory in the Best Actor race. On the surface, Murphy is an unlikely Oscar winner. Oppenheimer was his first nomination. While he is (rightly) respected within the industry, he is not an actor who has cultivated a narrative that he is “due” an Oscar. Certainly, going into the season, Paul Giamatti seemed like a much stronger contender for his work on The Holdovers, making up for his “snub” for Sideways years earlier.

In a competitive race that tends to favor “the most acting” over the best acting, Murphy’s Oppenheimer performance seems like a strange pick. As J. Robert Oppenheimer, Murphy plays an introverted and introspective character. It is not a showy performance. Indeed, much like Nolan contrasted Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman in The Prestige, Oppenheimer juxtaposes Murphy’s quieter performance with showier work from Best Supporting Actor winner Robert Downey Jr.

However, Murphy is one of Nolan’s most consistent creative collaborators. Of course, Nolan tends to work repeatedly with actors that he likes: Michael Caine, Jeremy Theobald, Christian Bale, Tom Hardy, Gary Oldman, Anne Hathaway, Kenneth Branagh, Ken Watanabe, Matt Damon, James D’Arcy, and even Josh Stewart. Murphy has appeared in six of Nolan’s films to date: Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, Inception, The Dark Knight Rises, Dunkirk, and Oppenheimer.

Murphy had auditioned to play Bruce Wayne in Batman Begins, but was cast in the supporting role of the Scarecrow instead. As such, Oppenheimer was a big deal for the pair. Nolan and Murphy have both talked about how significant it felt for Murphy to finally get to play a lead role in one of Nolan’s films. As wonderful as Murphy’s performance is, it’s hard to imagine it winning without the film’s momentum behind him, as recognition that he and the film itself are fundamentally inseparable.

This awards success has allowed well-deserved and perhaps even long-overdue recognition for Nolan’s other collaborators. Throughout the season, with Oppenheimer picking up Best Director and Best Picture awards, Nolan tended to give the acceptance speech for Best Director and his wife and producer Emma Thomas would give the speech for Best Picture. This was the order of play at the Golden Globes, the BAFTAs, and the Critics’ Choice Awards.

Thomas has always been an essential part of her husband’s filmmaking. She has produced his movies dating back to Doodlebug, the last short he made before his feature debut with Following. Indeed, Nolan followed Thomas to Los Angeles, after she got a job there with the company Working Title. She helped him clarify the complex script for his second film, Memento, and it was Thomas who pitched it to Newmarket Films. Without Thomas, there is no Nolan.

Thomas and Murphy were not the only frequent Nolan collaborators to receive awards. Veteran cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema, who won his first Oscar for Oppenheimer, has shot all of Nolan’s films since Interstellar, after Nolan’s previous cinematographer, Wally Pfister, transitioned into directing. Jennifer Lame, who won Best Editing, and Ludwig Göransson, who won Best Score, both worked with Nolan on Tenet. Lame had previously been Noah Baumbach’s go-to editor.

Before Lame and Göransson, Nolan had worked for years with editor Lee Smith and composer Hans Zimmer. He has worked frequently with production designer Nathan Crowley. He wrote several scripts with his brother Jonathan; Memento and Interstellar originated as ideas from Jonathan before Christopher took over. Richard King, who was nominated for Best Sound on Oppenheimer, has worked on every Nolan film since The Prestige and won Oscars for The Dark Knight, Inception and Dunkirk.

Awards sweeps don’t always trend towards long-term creative collaborations. There are exceptions, of course, but these tend to be strong individual relationships rather than larger teams. Long-term collaborators director Martin Scorsese and editor Thelma Schoonmaker both took home awards for The Departed. Editor Jamie Selkirk had been working with director Peter Jackson for his entire career when he won the Best Editing Oscar for The Lord of the Rings: Return of the Kings.

However, the nature of the business means such partnerships are not the default. Composer A.R. Ramhan and editor Chris Dickens both won as part of Slumdog Millionaire’s eight-trophy sweep, but neither had worked with director Danny Boyle before that point and Ramhan would only work with him once more, on 127 Hours. When Graham King won Best Picture for The Departed, it was just the second of a total of three collaborations with Scorsese across the director’s twenty-seven-film career.

Cinematographer Janusz Kamiński would become Spielberg’s go-to cinematographer, but he won his first Academy Award as a result of their first collaboration, Schindler’s List. Two of the eight Oscars for Cabaret would go to cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth and editor David Bretherton, neither of whom worked with director Bob Fosse before or after. None of this has any bearing on the quality of the work, but underscores that recognition of these long-term collaborations is not the norm.

Nolan’s films are often structured around this central idea, the notion of a larger team pushing an individual forward. Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) has his collaborators in Inception, while Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) is dependent on his allies in Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy. The dueling magicians in The Prestige are dependent on ingenieurs like Cutter (Michael Caine) and assistants like Wenscombe (Scarlett Johansson). Even in Oppenheimer, the eponymous scientist builds a town in the desert.

It is perhaps cliché to consider an artist’s work inherently autobiographical, to read too much into their choices and preferences. Still, many of Nolan’s films are about a team brought together to realize an ambitious project. Many of these stories can be read as metaphors for the process of making a movie, which makes a certain amount of sense. This is a large part of Nolan’s life. As such, it’s informative that Nolan repeatedly stresses the importance of the collective over the individual.

There is a tendency to think of Nolan as a fussy auteur and perhaps even as a cinematic tyrant. There’s certainly good reason to be wary of the cult of personality that can build around a “visionary” director. The past few years have demonstrated how many auteurs have abused their power and influence. However, Nolan’s career has been defined by his creative collaborations with craftspeople working at the very top of their game. The resulting films are undoubtedly the stronger for it.

In recent decades, Hollywood filmmaking has become increasingly impersonal and algorithmic, with studios often stripping any hint of personality or humanity from their big tentpoles. As the industry finds itself in an extended existential crisis, Oppenheimer’s sweep feels significant and important. This isn’t just long-overdue recognition from one of the most distinct and unique blockbuster filmmakers working today, but an acknowledgement of the skilled team that exists around him.

It is very hard to make a movie, but many of the best movies are the result of incredibly talented people working together in conjunction with a director that they trust and one who trusts them in turn. Oppenheimer’s awards recognition is not just validation of Nolan, but also an endorsement of a truly collaborative way of making movies.