The Oppenheimer director could win the coveted statuette on March 10 at the Oscars award ceremony.
Christopher Nolan has had one of the best years of his career. During 2023, the British filmmaker released Oppenheimer, considered by many to be one of the best films of his career.
The film was a complete success. Not only was it one of the highest-grossing films of the year, but it was also widely acclaimed by critics and fans of the director.
For the past few months, Oppenheimer has been an awards season favorite. The film leads the Oscar nominations, where it competes with 13 nominations, including best film and best director.
The truth is that his favoritism for the Academy Awards is getting closer to becoming reality. During the 76th edition of the DGA Awards, the Directors Guild Awards, Nolan was recognized by his peers as the best director, one of the highest distinctions awarded by the directors guild.
Over the past 75 years, most DGA winners tend to go in the Best Director category at the Oscars. In the last decade, the winners of both awards have coincided nine times out of 10. However, the tie between director and best film has only coincided on four occasions.
This year, only three of the DGA Awards nominees correspond to the list of directors nominated for the Oscar. While the guild nominated Nolan, Martin Scorsese (Killers of the Flower Moon), Yorgos Lanthimos (Poor Things), Greta Gerwig (Barbie) and Alexander Payne (Those Who Remain), the Academy left out the last two to give place to Jonathan Glazer (The Zone of Interest) and Justine Triet (Anatomy of a Fall).
Although this year we found great talent behind the cameras, this year Christopher Nolan is positioned as one of the favorites, and his victory at the DGA only reaffirms that on March 10 he will win the statuette in the Best Director category at the 96th Academy Awards.
“I don’t want to leave the stage without you understanding how much this means to me: that the idea of my peers thinking I deserve it means everything to me,” Nolan said as part of his acceptance speech.
You don’t have to be a great connoisseur of cinema to realize that Christopher Nolan is one of the great directors of today. Films like Memento, Inception, Dunkirk, and Oppenheimer herself, show the complexity and scale that he handles in his titles, as well as the diversity of genres that he has known how to explore, making him a director who is not afraid to take risks, but rather that is capable of transforming it into a rarely seen cinematic experience.
As for the Oscar, this is Nolan’s second nomination as a director (the first was for Dunkirk) and his third for Best Picture. It is time for the Academy to settle its pending accounts and recognize once and for all one of the best directors of modern cinema.