Oscars 2024: Just How Many Oscars Will Oppenheimer Win?

Heading into last weekend, we didn’t know for certain just how broad Oppenheimer’s support is within the industry. We’ve been down this road before with films like 1917 or La La Land getting close, only to be derailed at the Oscars with a Best Picture upset.

But now we know Oppenheimer has support from the producers, the directors, and, to an unprecedented degree, the actors. We have yet to hear from the writers, the sound engineers, the editors, or the cinematographers.

The number of Oscars Oppenheimer might win depends on those branches. Will it win Adapted Screenplay, or does it lose to American Fiction? Will it win Sound, or does it lose to The Zone of Interest? Will it win Cinematography, or does it lose to Poor Things?

Why Oppenheimer? Why now? Here are a few reasons.

Christopher Nolan is long overdue. Sometimes, a director who has never won lands with just the right movie at just the right time, and there is no choice but to throw Oscars at them in appreciation. This was Martin Scorsese in 2006. This was the Coen brothers in 2007. Great directors build up a pile of chips and sometimes it’s time to cash them in. This is one of those times. Either they win as a bright light that fades, like Tom Hooper. Or they build up a strong catalog of great films and they eventually win. Sometimes they don’t. Hitchcock never did. Kubrick never did.
The Church of Cinema brings in a blockbuster. Even people who didn’t “connect” with Oppenheimer understand what just happened. Nolan’s commitment to real film and to movie theaters — to IMAX — has driven remarkable success for years now. But to have made a three-hour movie about physics that would become one of the year’s biggest money-makers is unheard of post-2020.
A Dying City — Can Nolan, or Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, rescue the collapsing empire? Maybe they can’t rescue it but perhaps they can light the way. People will come if there are “event movies,” as Steven Spielberg and George Lucas once predicted. Event movies mean cultural phenomena — Barbenheimer. At a time when much of Hollywood is grossing out Gen-Z with too much sex and too much indulgence, Weimar Germany style, Barbenheimer offered them what Top Gun: Maverick offered the year before a pendulum swing toward more traditional movies. The industry understands how close we are to all of this going away. It might be too little too late, but they’re not giving up without a fight.
What the movie is about. I’ve never been sure how much of Oppenheimer most people really understand. It is incredibly dense and complicated. I’ve seen the movie now over ten times at least and I still catch bits and pieces I missed. I’ve also read American Prometheus, which is not exactly an easy read. I brought my Gen Z nieces to see Barbenheimer. They had to be part of the trend. They liked Barbie but they LOVED Oppenheimer. Even if they didn’t understand every bit of it, they got the general idea: the American Prometheus who helped build the bomb lives to regret it. Oppenheimer was an American hero. He was a brilliant scientist and one of the brightest lights. He was both fighting the Nazis and also trying to stop the inevitable arms race. His charisma reaches across time — they just don’t make them like that very often. Except when they do, as with Christopher Nolan.
What the movie is REALLY about. This is the more controversial part of this piece so you should skip it if you’re easily triggered. If you don’t know me or my own personal perspective, you might find this part a little, shall we say, difficult. Oppenheimer is about two things. It’s about the nukes that ended the war and what the Cold War did to our country, specifically to Oppenheimer. This is about Left or Right, or Conservative or Liberal, or even Communist or Capitalist. It’s about those who have power and those who don’t. Robert J. Oppenheimer was, in the parlance of our times, “woke.” He was very much a leftie, through and through. He fought for desegregation, as most Communists did back in the 1930s. He donated to the resistance in the Spanish Civil War. He followed the same trajectory as George Orwell did — believing in Communism then falling into disillusionment and despair after Stalin and the rise of totalitarianism.
So why is that so relevant today? You have to take the macro view. Most people are so locked into their own tribes they can’t do it. But what happened in the 1950s is what has happened to this country post-2016. To the Left, Trump’s win was like a war. They believed they were the “resistance,” but they were not. There wasn’t a “rally around the flag” so much as there was a “rally around the Democrats.” That led to the same kind of large-scale alliance of culture and government we saw in 1954, when our government persecuted Oppenheimer and removed his security clearance. Because the Left stood against the Black List and the McCarthy trials (The Crucible, the Twilight Zone), they feel comfortable with Oppenheimer, that they’re on the right side of history. They were then. Now, not so much. What we’ve seen on the Left over the past seven years is a lot like the Red Scare. There is the same kind of climate of fear. The same kind of black lists. The same kind of thought policing, fear, and paranoia. On some level, people respond to that in Oppenheimer, even if they can’t really name it. They recognize it.
Someday in the not too distant future, we will look back on this era and we will recognize just how relevant Oppenheimer really was, not just because of the nukes, but because of what can happen to the brights lights when fear and paranoia cause us to do terrible things.

So how many Oscars right now is Oppenheimer expected to win?

Picture — locked
Director — locked
Score — locked
Editing — locked
Supporting Actor — locked

It looks strong on:

Best Actor — with the possible upset by Paul Giamatti in The Holdovers
Sound — possible, but they could go with The Zone of Interest
Cinematography — depends on how much they love Poor Things

To take it over the top, it could win:

Adapted Screenplay
Hair and Makeup

It feels safe with five or six Oscars for now, but it could become the new record holder in the expanded ballot era with eight, or maybe even 10.

The Writers

We won’t hear from the Writers Guild until long after the Oscars. All we have to rely on, other than the BAFTAs, are the Scripters (March 2). If the Scripters voted on the best, which they never really have, they would have no choice but to vote for Oppenheimer and American Prometheus. I don’t think they’ll do that because the screenplay prizes often hold the place of movies that won’t win Best Picture. American Fiction is expected to win the Scripters, as it did at the BAFTAs, and then the Oscars.

BUT if the Oscar voters catch a wave and Oppenheimer can’t be stopped, it will win Screenplay too (though it would be unusual for Christopher Nolan to win writer, director, and producer — the only solo writer-director to have achieved that trifecta is James L. Brooks for Terms of Endearment, almost 40 years ago).

The script is full of great lines like “Until someone builds a bigger bomb,” and “Amateurs seek the sun, get eaten. Power stays in the shadows.” And “Do you think that if you let them tar and feather you the world will forgive you? They won’t.” These quotes and others will remembered for decades.

Does that mean it wins? Odds are against it. Yes, Return of the King and Slumdog Millionaire both won Screenplay and it’s kind of unheard of for a film that sweeps not to win Screenplay, but since Oppie didn’t win the BAFTA, when it really should have, that makes it seem less likely it wins the Oscar.

Cinematographers

The Cinematographers will hold their ceremony March 3, like the Editors and the Motion Picture Sound Editors (Oppie will do well with both). I wouldn’t predict anything but Oppenheimer for this, especially considering IMAX. But you just never know. I expect it will be a slam dunk at ASC and at the Oscars.

Sound

Here are the Nolan movies that have won the Sound categories:

The Dark Knight — Sound Editing
Inception — Sound Editing/Mixing
Dunkirk — Sound Editing/Mixing

I don’t know what will happen with the new Academy but it’s hard for me to imagine, knowing Oppenheimer as I do, that it doesn’t win this award in a sweep. Who knows.

It’s really this one scene that makes me think of the sound in Oppenheimer, from the silent cheering to the scream to the feet stomping.