Oscars 2024: Christopher Nolan finally wins Best Director award at 96th Academy Awards

Oscars 2024: Christopher Nolan won his first directing Oscar, for the acclaimed blockbuster Oppenheimer.

Christopher Nolan won his first directing Oscar for Oppenheimer.

In a significant victory over their formidable competitors, filmmaker Christopher Nolan was named Best Director at the 96th Academy Awards ceremony, held at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, on March 10, for Oppenheimer. This marks the first Oscar win of the auteur known for his big-canvas films.

Nolan’s epic drama about the father of the atomic bomb, Oppenheimer remains one of the most acclaimed films of 2023 that also reinvigorated the box office as one half of last summer’s Barbenheimer phenomenon. It went on to sweep awards at the Golden Globes and BAFTA, and has won one of the top film awards at nine different guild or professional association awards shows.

Also read – 96th Academy Awards full winners list: From Christopher Nolan to Robert Downey Jr, who triumphed at Oscars 2024

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Before Oscars 2024, Nolan received five nominations for three different films but never won an Academy Award. He was nominated for Best Original Screenplay for Memento (2002), for Best Picture and Original Screenplay for Inception (2010), and Best Picture and Best Director nods for Dunkirk (2018).

The nominees for the Best Director award were Justine Triet for Anatomy of a Fall, Martin Scorsese for Killers of the Flower Moon, Christopher Nolan for Oppenheimer, Yorgos Lanthimos for Poor Things and Jonathan Glazer for The Zone of Interest. The nomination list had faced significant backlash for omitting filmmaker Greta Gerwig, who did not receive a nod for her global blockbuster Barbie.

In the previous year, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert shared the Best Director honour for their absurdist comedy-drama Everything Everywhere All at Once, which also clinched the Best Picture award.

Following his win at the Directors Guild of America (DGA) Awards for Outstanding Directing – Feature Film for the epic biographical thriller Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s chances of winning the Best Director award at the Oscars had received a boost due to the considerable overlap in membership between the DGA and Oscar voters.

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Since 2013, the winner of the DGA Award for Outstanding Directing – Feature Film has also gone on to win the Academy Award for Best Director in nine out of ten instances. The lone exception was Sam Mendes, who won the DGA award but lost the Oscar to South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-ho for the movie Parasite.

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