With Oppenheimer ’s Win, Christopher Nolan Has Done Something Not Even Spielberg Managed

The world’s most popular director sits in the crowd, waiting for the star onstage to open the envelope. When his movie is named, he embraces his wife, then walks to the stage. It has been almost two decades since his breakthrough, the movie that made him a popular and artistic juggernaut: a director who can concoct images no one has seen before, who directs with unprecedented scale and style, who can bend studios to his will and draw audiences on the strength of his name alone. For years his films have collected Oscar nominations, but he’s never won the award, always dismissed for being a mere master of the blockbuster, a technical wizard who’s all spectacle, no art. A few years back he even diverged from his sci-fi lane to make a big World War II drama, the classic Oscar play—only to lose out, as ever.

Now, finally, his second World War II–set epic has united the industry behind him. Here he is, ascending the steps and accepting his first-ever Academy Award. The year is 1994, the movie sweeping the Oscars is Schindler’s List, and the Best Director is Steven Spielberg.

But on Oscar night 2024, as Oppenheimer won seven Oscars, including Best Director and Best Picture for Christopher Nolan, we just watched another era’s premier director walk the trail blazed by Spielberg 30 years before. Like that other virtuoso of the megahit, Nolan has labored for decades as the undisputed commercial king of the industry without ever being recognized by the academy. Spielberg, though, finally won his Oscars by transforming his image and his moviemaking to meet the academy where it was. On Sunday night, Spielberg stood on the stage and announced Christopher Nolan’s Best Director win. It was another sign that Nolan, unlike Spielberg, has simply allowed the academy to come to him.

Curiously, the critical raps on the two have always been diametrically opposed. Nolan, of course, has long had the reputation as a brainy, chilly director more interested in teasingly complex structure than he is in telling a simple, compelling story. To Spielberg’s onetime critics, the director was too sentimental, too populist, unable to stop himself from giving even the most challenging stories an uplifting sheen of movie magic.

Such critiques arrived as soon as Spielberg started making “adult” movies. “Mr. Spielberg’s film is a tribute to Hollywood,” the New York Times’ Vincent Canby wrote of 1985’s The Color Purple, which he called “insidiously entertaining.” Purple was nominated for 11 Oscars and won exactly zero, tying the record for most nominations without an award. Two years later the director’s first attempt at a World War II drama, Empire of the Sun, presented a Japanese POW camp through the eyes of a British boy, played by 12-year-old Christian Bale. The Village Voice’s J. Hoberman called it “shamelessly kiddiecentric,” and the movie once again was shut out at the Oscars.

Even when Schindler’s got raves, they were streaked through with condescension. Noted one laudatory Times essay: “The wonder, these rapturous reviews hinted, was not that a powerful film had been made about the Holocaust but that Peter Pan had made it.” And not everyone believed that Spielberg had pulled it off. Hoberman was withering: “a feel-good entertainment about the ultimate feel-bad experience of the 20^th Century.” As the Oscars approached, Frank Rich made his feelings known in the Times. “The hype is already taking on a life of its own, wrapping the movie and the Holocaust in a neat, uplifting Hollywood ending,” he wrote. “And there’s a happy ending for Mr. Spielberg, too: Having come of age as a Jew, he may get a prize greater than a fountain pen—the Oscar he has so long and unjustly been denied.”

It was clear to everyone how much heart-on-his-sleeve Spielberg wanted that Oscar. He’d been denied a Best Director nomination for Jaws; had lost for Close Encounters, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and E.T.; had been snubbed for Color Purple and Empire. While he was always careful to foreground his discussions of Schindler’s with respectful references to the victims and to his own Judaism, he determinedly put forth a narrative that Steven Spielberg, boy genius, had finally cast aside childish things. “I’m coming away from this experience saying, ‘Oh my God, all these years and look what I’ve been missing,’ ” he told Newsweek. “I may never go back to the bicycle across the moon for a couple of years.” In profile after profile, the message was clear: “People say, ‘Gee, isn’t he capable of only doing dinosaur sci-fi pictures or adventure yarns?’ ” the studio president Sidney Sheinberg, Spielberg’s mentor, told the Times. “Well, the answer is no.”

Such was the power of the film, its black-and-white solemnity, and its reverence for its unthinkable subject, that it wasn’t hard to take Spielberg at his word. The Oscar ceremony in 1994 cemented this narrative, as Schindler’s took seven awards. The moment during that ceremony I’ll never forget occurred just after he won Best Director, while Harrison Ford was announcing the nominees for Best Picture. The camera cut to Spielberg, waiting backstage, and caught him gently running the head of the Oscar statue he’d just won through his beard, looking thoroughly overcome. When he accepted Best Picture seconds later, he said, “This is the best drink of water after the longest drought of my life.”

Unlike Spielberg, Nolan has never seemed particularly desperate for an Oscar. Surely he’s wanted one—he’s out there campaigning, after all—but he lacks the visible hunger that Spielberg displayed in the 1980s and 1990s. Or maybe it’s that we just don’t know about it, since Nolan, unlike Spielberg, is reserved in interviews, and in fact has barely even sat for a profile in nearly a decade. This reticence befits his filmmaking style, which has always been intellectual, intricate, a little cold, unlike Spielberg’s un-tampable warmth. Both display astonishing technical wizardry, but for Nolan, spectacle is a tool employed to provoke existential awe rather than Spielberg’s wide-eyed wonder.

It’s been that way his whole career—presumably Nolan’s legendary lost student film Larceny is a cerebral, perfectly structured timepiece of a short—and certainly since his commercial breakthrough, 2005’s Batman Begins, he has established that whether he’s making franchise sequels, historical adaptations, or his own original ideas, he’s going to approach them in his very specifically Nolanian manner. His screenplays are ornately structured; his characters tend to the brooding and tortured; his vision fills ever-bigger movie screens with ever more dumbfounding sights.

As with Spielberg, the academy has flirted with Nolan and his films almost from the beginning. He was nominated for Memento’s screenplay, and while The Dark Knight won Heath Ledger a posthumous Oscar and was nominated for seven technical awards, its unexpected omission from the then-five-nominee Best Picture field is the reason we have 10 nominees in that category today. He lost Best Picture for Inception and both Picture and Director for Dunkirk, his first World War II movie, a remarkable accomplishment in innovative storytelling but not exactly a movie straight from the heart. “It’s a bit emotionally chilly, more of a triumph of construction than feeling,” Emily St. James wrote in Vox at the time. “This isn’t a bad thing, but it rarely wins you an Oscar. Just ask Stanley Kubrick.” Dunkirk won three below-the-lines Oscars—a familiar result for Nolan, who has watched the engineers and designers and cinematographers on his films bring home 10 awards without ever winning one himself.

But with Oppenheimer, Nolan didn’t take the now-familiar steps Spielberg laid down in an attempt to get Hollywood, and the academy, to finally take him seriously. He did not depart significantly from his trademark filmmaking style, or impart the movie’s version of history with greater solemnity or weight than he usually gives his subjects. (Christopher Nolan movies, by definition, are already maximally solemn and weighty.) As ever, Nolan was inspired more by the ideas and the dilemmas embedded in Oppenheimer’s story than he was the people within it. Though he speaks eloquently about the danger posed by the great powers’ nuclear arsenals, when asked why he made Oppenheimer, his answer is fascinating but not personal. “Nuclear weapons are in a class of their own in terms of destructive power for humankind,” Nolan says. “It speaks to the heart of why I wanted to make a film about the Manhattan Project. These [scientists] were the most brilliant people on the planet; they knew exactly what was going to happen.”

And Nolan’s recounting, in Oscar-season interviews, of the signal moment in his Oppenheimer experience is almost comically cavalier, especially compared to Spielberg’s countless 1993 appearances alongside survivors and world leaders, his ceaseless evocation of the lost 6 million, which clearly overwhelmed him at times—leaving him with a sense that his duty to the film extended far beyond simply making it and letting audiences enjoy it. Nolan likes to tell a story of sneaking into the back of Lincoln Square’s IMAX theater on opening weekend with his wife, co-producer Emma Thomas. “It was absolutely packed; every seat was filled,” he said in one of the multiple interviews where he evokes this moment. They arrived just during the movie’s Trinity test sequence. “To be in the back of that theatre in that moment of silence, before the sound washes over the audience … you could hear a pin drop. It was a really remarkable experience. Quite overwhelming, really.”

Christopher Nolan didn’t need to transform his filmmaking, or present himself as suddenly a grown-up, or declare he no longer cares about wowing an audience, to finally win his Academy Awards. He didn’t need to persuade Hollywood to take him seriously. Nolan is, essentially, the only cinema brand as strong as the IP behemoths that rule the box office. He’s devoted to saving his multibillion-dollar industry, and he seems like the only person who just might be able to do it. Hollywood must take him seriously, and it does. Here it is with the Oscars to prove it, once and for all.

Where does Nolan’s career go from here? After Schindler’s, Spielberg, consumed by his work with the Shoah Foundation, took nearly four years to release another movie—although when he did, the director who had told the Times, upon Schindler’s release, “I can’t conceive of anything that’s simply entertainment” made a sequel to Jurassic Park. Since then, he’s had a majestic career, alternating serious historical movies—Saving Private Ryan (with its own complicated Oscar story), Munich, Lincoln—with sparkling entertainments, occasionally superior in their ways to the “adult” movies. He no longer seems tortured by justifying the difference between these modes, nor does the press ask him to.

As with Spielberg, it seems likely that every Christopher Nolan movie from now until the end of his career will be an event, in part because he’s unwilling ever to paint on a small canvas. “I’m drawn to working at a large scale because I know how fragile the opportunity to marshal those resources is,” he has said. “I know that there are so many filmmakers out there in the world who would give their eye teeth to have the resources I put together, and I feel I have the responsibility to use them in the most productive and interesting way.” His movies will continue to be intricately constructed, deeply serious, mammoth technical achievements. He will keep making exactly the kinds of movies he has always made.

After all, the one aspect of Oppenheimer that does seem uniquely, Spielbergianly personal to Nolan is its portrayal of its project-manager hero. J. Robert Oppenheimer moved mountains to mobilize hundreds and accomplish the impossible. Christopher Nolan, who tellingly wrote the screenplay in the first person, does the same thing every time he makes a movie. Though you don’t get the sense that Nolan, unlike haunted Oppenheimer, feels even the slightest bit conflicted about his accomplishments. Oppenheimer worried he had destroyed the world. Nolan’s on top of it.