Christopher nolan

Sir Christopher Nolan is many things. The Spielberg/Lucas/Cameron manqué of our time. A double Oscar-winner for Oppenheimer, a picture that is nowhere near his best work. The most acclaimed director of film bros, who somehow ignore his standing as a white, British privately educated filmmaker. But what nobody has ever seriously asked before is “Is Sir Christopher camp?” I hesitate to say that. The (relatively) newly knighted director is as serious a figure as has ever been seen in the film industry. But after watching the new trailer for his magnum opus, The Odyssey, it is a question that I must ask. We have Good Will Hunting himself, Matt Damon, as Nolan’s conception of Odysseus. All good there; I myself would have cast Michael Fassbender, but hey-ho.

That creaking sound you hear creaking is Jack Warner, the founder of Warner Bros. studio, turning in his grave. Last week, it was announced that Netflix had purchased one of Hollywood’s most respected studios for a staggering, indeed insane $83 billion – which makes Disney’s purchase of Lucasfilm for $4 billion in 2012 seem like the bargain of the century. The sale would create a monopoly the likes of which has never been seen before in the film industry. Most people assumed that such a bid – in this increasingly beleaguered business – is very, very bad news. They might be correct. That’s why it’s even more staggering that Paramount have today, with impeccable timing, announced their own hostile takeover bid for Warner, offering an even more outlandish $108.

Of the many inevitables of Oscar season, one certainty is that the film or filmmakers perceived to be the front-runner will find themselves in a spot of difficulty before the awards ceremony. There is a legion of highly paid, aggressive publicists whose job is not only to promote their clients’ interests, but also to rubbish the competition. Granted, an Oscar is no longer the path to box-office success it once was — I’m not sure that anyone was rushing out to see CODA or Nomadland after their awards, not least because there was so little competition in the pandemic era — but it will add millions to an asking rate, instill lasting gravitas and ensure a movie’s lasting reputation. Many people really, really want to win an Oscar.

When Brian Robbins, CEO of Paramount Studios, addressed the company in a town hall meeting on Tuesday, he was not in celebratory mood. Amid the grim and downbeat words he had to utter — “We know what a difficult and disruptive period it has been. And while we cannot say that the noise will disappear, we are here today to lay out a go-forward plan that can set us up for success no matter what path the company chooses to go down” — the news that the studio’s profits have declined by 61 precent over the past five years was described by Showtime CEO Chris McCarthy as “simply unacceptable.” Paramount is in big trouble. The only questions now are why, and what can be done to ameliorate the situation?

It was once the case that, if a planned film in a two- or three-movie series came out and wasn’t very good, the remaining films would be scrapped. The world has changed with the advent of streaming, and even though Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon — Part One: A Child of Fire was greeted with critical contempt, its sequel Part Two: The Scargiver has slid onto Netflix, only to be met with, you guessed it, yet more dismay and horror.

In my pre-Oscar predictions, I wrote “we are now in that brief period where Christopher Nolan, the most significant director of the past two decades, is not an Oscar winner, and by the time people read this on Monday 11 March, that will no longer be the case.” And so it has proved. Oppenheimer won seven awards, including Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor. The only accolade that it might reasonably have expected to take that it was disappointed in was Sound, but The Zone of Interest deservedly nabbed that one.

The Academy Awards are a strange affair. Last year, they ignored Tár, a brilliant film that will be remembered as long as cinema exists, in favor of Everything Everywhere All At Once, an over-excitable picture that barely deserves to linger in the memory as long as you can recite its unmemorable name. But the nature of awards is that its directors — the Daniels! — are now Oscar-winning filmmakers, and so score above Hitchcock, Kubrick, Fincher and the rest. Anyway, we are now in that brief period where Christopher Nolan, the most significant director of the past two decades, is not an Oscar winner, yet soon, that will no longer be the case.

2023 was a great year for movies. After several disappointing and low-grade years post-pandemic, there was a plethora of brilliant films, all of which have combined to make awards season perhaps the most intriguing there’s been in more than a decade — even if it’s a virtual given that Christopher Nolan and Oppenheimer will storm to victory. But any year that contains the likes of Poor Things, Killers of the Flower Moon, Past Lives, The Zone of Interest and — oh yes — Barbie can only be taken seriously as one of the very best times for high-grade, intelligent film in memory. It was not a great year for blockbusters, however. The Marvel flops included The Marvels and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, and the likes of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, The Flash and Shazam!

My first reaction to this year’s Oscar nominations was that it was a sane and sober list, where the right films were recognized and where tokenism had largely been dispensed with. There were a couple of surprises: I had thought that Past Lives might have featured more heavily, but generally speaking, it was a robust and intellectually satisfactory assortment. But I had, of course, not fully reckoned with Barbie.

After the debacle of Jo Koy’s appalling, worst-ever hosting of this year’s Golden Globes ceremony, the organizers of the Academy Awards are probably patting themselves on the back in the knowledge that they’ve successfully hired safe-pair-of-hands Jimmy Kimmel for this year’s ceremony. Yes, alas, because his joke-nemesis Matt Damon features in this year’s dead-cert winner Oppenheimer, there will be the public continuation of the smuggest and least amusing fake feud in contemporary life, but at least Kimmel won’t offend anyone, knows how to deliver a carefully scripted punchline and can be relied upon to keep things moving at a lick.

The Golden Globes have historically been the strangest of all the major film awards ceremonies. Previously handed out by a mysterious body known as the HFPA (Hollywood Foreign Press Association), the ceremony has all the glamor and glitz of the Oscars, but with one big difference: there is free-flowing alcohol on all the tables, meaning that, more often than not, audiences can enjoy the spectacle of at least one A-list star collecting their award blind drunk, which leads to some of the more unorthodox and entertaining speeches in recent memory. And this unrestrained ethos extends itself to the hosts, too.

Film bros have long had their list of sacred-cow directors who can apparently do no wrong: Scorsese and Fincher and Nolan, of course, but also the likes of Denis Villeneuve, Paul Thomas Anderson and — as of this year — Greta Gerwig. To their number should now be added Paul King, a filmmaker whose name may be less familiar than some of his peers, but whose flair and ability to make apparently risky projects not only work but succeed admirably and hilariously was demonstrated by his two Paddington films. It is now confirmed by the critical and commercial success of his Charlie and the Chocolate Factory prequel, Wonka, which triumphantly overcame mediocre pre-release buzz by being a marvelously sweet confection.

A decade ago, Alfonso Cuarón’s sci-fi thriller Gravity soared into theaters, to ecstatic reviews and a vast box office. Its success was all the more surprising — and welcome — because it had been dogged by reports of disastrous test screenings and production chaos, with its innovative, visual effects-heavy story apparently beset by the envelope-pushing demands of the technology that it required to depict its world. The movie could easily have been a colossal flop, but instead it seemed to herald a brave new dawn for ambitious, intelligent science fiction filmmaking that soared into the stratosphere, in both senses. Ten years on, the success of Gravity, or even Ridley Scott’s The Martian, are very distant memories.

At last, there is the Hollywood equivalent of white smoke in the Vatican. After nearly five months, the writers’ strike has at last — tentatively — been resolved, as the Writers’ Guild of America have agreed to terms with the studios, as represented by the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP). The terms have not yet been publicly disclosed, but are said to be surprisingly generous, and favor the writers. It has been suggested that their major demands have all been met, including improved residual payments on streaming services, an increased number of writers employed on shows and, most importantly for many both financially and artistically, a curb on the way in which AI might be used to generate scripts and screenplays.

If the average person were to be asked what Sir Kenneth Branagh had won an Oscar for, the vast majority would probably say “acting.” Then when told that, despite two Academy Award nominations, he has not been so rewarded, they might then assume that it’s his direction of such films as Henry V, Hamlet or Belfast that led him to take him gold. In fact, though, it’s his screenplay for the latter film that finally won him an Oscar in 2022, showing that Branagh is a true renaissance man; it is not for nothing that first theater company he founded was called the Renaissance. This summer has been, as usual, a busy and productive one for the actor-writer-director.