Election years should make the Oscars look ridiculous. Because, of course, they are — an overblown school prize day, dreamt up by early Hollywood to treat movies like art and a horse race. And yet, every 12 months we are again invited to take them seriously. Occasionally, the idea is tempting. In the glow of triumph for a Schindler’s List or a Moonlight, the awards come close to actual significance. Other years, Will Smith slaps Chris Rock, and you remember what nonsense it all is.
But this weekend’s Oscars already feel different. They take place in a year when more than half of the world’s population is due to vote in national elections. Statistically at least, 2024 will be the biggest democratic exercise in history.
As if in response, gravitas surrounds this year’s awards. Much of it comes from Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s portrait of the nuclear physicist. A sturdy and accomplished film, it has long been runaway favourite in most high-profile categories: Best Picture, Best Director for Nolan and acting prizes expected for stars Cillian Murphy and Robert Downey Jr.
Glory seems certain for Oppenheimer. Unless a plot twist intervenes. Recent reports have instead suggested a swell of support for The Zone of Interest, Jonathan Glazer’s unnerving domestic study of Rudolf and Hedwig Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz and his wife.
A belated rival to Nolan may lend Sunday night suspense. And yet Oppenheimer and The Zone of Interest are two films cut from comparable cloths: grimly timely accounts of dark modern history. It is enough to make you wonder if something has turned upside down in the proper relationship between the Oscars and real life.
After all, in this year of the global ballot box, too many elections will be marred by ego and frippery, fakery and corruption. Whereas the Oscars — of all things — are where we now find a sincere engagement with critical issues. Oppenheimer is a sober film about the shadow of the bomb, released with nuclear conflict closer than at any point since the end of the cold war. The Zone of Interest asks us to reflect on complicity and genocide in times of obliterating violence.
Some might now see that as a strange kind of escapism. In the UK and US at least, much of the current ennui about democracy arises from a sense of politicians dwarfed by the world around them. Among many of those seeking power, the stark realities that Nolan and Glazer meet head-on are instead evaded or debased into slogans.
The contrast is only heightened by the directors’ personalities: the kind of thoughtful, unsplashy but charismatic figures so lacking in many political landscapes. When politics shrinks to ringmasters and bureaucrats, Christopher Nolan can read as downright presidential. (Or, given his dual citizenship, prime ministerial.)
But cinema is also a sleight of hand. And to make the story of the 2024 Oscars one of grown-ups in a time of crisis, the Academy also had to nudge to the margins a movie that was, among other things, the year’s most popular: Barbie. A wildly inventive tightrope walk that could have failed horribly but made $1.4bn, it has never been more than an also-ran on the Best Picture shortlist. That much was confirmed in advance by the nominations it didn’t receive. No place for star Margot Robbie among potential Best Actresses; Greta Gerwig cut from Best Director.
Perspective is again important. Imagine living in a country where the only people who can vote are people in the movie business. That country is the Oscars. Helen Mirren, narrator of Barbie, responded coolly to the treatment of Gerwig and Robbie. “You can’t get upset about things like that,” she said. “Do you remember who won best film the year before last?” (The answer: Coda, which may underscore her point.) Instead, Mirren said, the bottom line remained the same as it ever was: “What is fantastic is that Barbie was the highest grossing film Warner Bros have had in their lives.”
Still, mention of that only returns us to the Friday last July when Nolan and Gerwig’s films were released in sync, to become the accidental phenomenon “Barbenheimer”. For Hollywood, one good news story was the vast audiences lured into cinemas. The second was that they lined up for two highly unusual blockbusters: standalone stories, assembled with real intelligence. They made a fine odd couple.
Yet come the Oscar nominations, one proved more equal than the other. Could that really just be down to gender? Still? Even now? The picture is complicated by the love the Academy has shown French director Justine Triet and her mesmeric thriller Anatomy of a Fall. But one culprit seems at least a cousin to sexism: a misguided willingness to take literally Barbie’s winking pitch as hot-pink fluff.
In fact, the film was often brilliantly quick-witted. Yet any hint of fluff — even fluff this deeply knowing — is an Academy red line. And not the only one of which Barbie fell foul.
For one, too much money made at the box office still carries a whiff of vulgarity. (Ironic given the first consequence of an Oscar win: a salary hike.) But Gerwig’s movie was also victim of another of its successes. Amid last summer’s rush to the multiplex, the film sparked mayhem on social media. For many of the TikTok users miming to “I’m Just Ken”, it may have been the first time cinema registered in their lives. The legacy for the industry will be hugely positive. But at the Oscars, it seems, no good deed goes unpunished.
Instead, 2024 has seen awards voters favour a more traditional idea of great film and great film audiences. Oppenheimer is superbly executed. It is also precisely the kind of movie for which the Oscars have always gone gaga: an epic biopic whose seriousness of purpose is clearly and repeatedly signposted.
That much is true of The Zone of Interest too, one of several overlaps between it and Oppenheimer. Both films largely take place inside the frame of the second world war, centred on an abyss we are left to imagine: Hiroshima is the centre of Oppenheimer but goes unseen; Glazer’s Auschwitz is an exterior. In each, the focus falls wholly on the architects of the horror. And twice over, the director’s creative vision is put front and centre.
“That is what filmmaking is supposed to do,” an anonymous Academy voter has been quoted saying of Glazer’s project. In other words, even after so much reinvention for the Oscars, the old Hollywood value system still reigns. Back in 1929, the awards began as a mogul-led exercise in claiming prestige status for this once trashy medium. And now, the model Oscar winner is still the one seen to land an inch above mass tastes, with a non-specific feel of excellence. (Another unwritten Academy rule: it is impossible for any film to be funny and say something of consequence.)
And the shock of the new is not helpful. Much of the intellectual heavy-lifting for Oppenheimer was done by Kai Bird and Martin J Sherman’s biography American Prometheus. The Zone of Interest adapts a scenario from Martin Amis’s source novel, with a further debt to Hannah Arendt, who first described the likes of Rudolf Höss in terms of the “banality of evil”.
Barbie, however, was a film made without a blueprint: a movie that often seemed like a chaotic experiment, conducted at blockbuster scale. Were we watching a smart and daring comment on capitalism, consumerism and social norms? A weird slab of product placement? Or all of that at once?
“Doing the thing and subverting the thing,” was what Gerwig called it. That proved one thing too many for the Oscars. Instead, the TikTok audience have been put back in their box. Little for them to see here come Sunday. For Hollywood not to extend the invite feels very much like tempting fate. Like that other great 20th-century idea, mass democracy, cinema depends on participation. And it needs all the names on the ballot.
The Academy Awards take place on March 10
