Lily Gladstone

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.