Finally, and ironically, an immutable law of physics — what goes up, comes down — didn’t kick in. Right from July 2023 when Christopher Nolan’s biopic Oppenheimer released to critical hosannahs and box-office bonanzas all over the world, it had begun gathering Oscars buzz.
Through the awards season, that buzz kept spiralling, and the film, a mostly-sympathetic portrait of the father of the A-bomb, ended up hoovering seven of the big awards at the 96th Academy Awards night: Best Picture, Best Director (Nolan), Best Actor (Cillian Murphy), Best Supporting Actor (Robert Downey Jr), as well as the ones for Editing, Cinematography, and Original Score.
Barbie, the film that released on the same day, unleashing a wave of pink (viewers striking poses in fuschia-coloured costumes turned it into their own pre-movie movie) in a bid to turn our notions of greedy corporates who upsell plastic dolls on their well-groomed heads, didn’t fare as well. It won only one (Original Song) of its eight nominations: Director Greta Gerwig didn’t get a look-in, nor did Margot Robbie, who plays the titular character.
The two nominations in the Supporting Category, Ryan Gosling and America Ferrera, stayed right there, even if the former reprising his disarming “I’m Just Ken” act (and a spirited dance number) was one of the high points of the staid show, which began nearly an hour earlier than it usually does.
In the real world, the Barbenheimer double-bill became a zeitgeisty catch phrase of 2023. It denoted many things — showing naysayers sceptical about a movie on science and scientists their place, the importance of the women (and some good men) who became a potent box-office force in a movie about a pneumatic doll, and rescuing Hollywood and the larger world of movie-making from the pandemic-induced doldrums with their mighty global box-office collections.
But such are the strange, inexplicable and opaque ways that Academy voters — who have started moving on from its middle-aged-White-American prototype only in the past decade, that the doll didn’t stand a chance in front of the biopic which weighed heavily in on the side of the theoretical physicist who created the worst or the most effective weapon in the world, depending upon which side of the fence you stand.
Host Jimmy Kimmel, who started off with a shaky monologue — a couple of jokes about men dating their mothers and the shape of male nether-regions coming off tasteless — promised us surprises. But there really were none, unless you count a near-naked act by rapper-actor John Cena, who used a large envelope as a fig-leaf, saying “the male body is not a joke”. Cue, ripples of laughter in the audience. A nod to the David Niven-Elizabeth Taylor 1974 moment when a streaker ran across the stage, Cena was announcing the Best Costume design for Poor Things, and it really was a smarter gag than the way it came off: Yargos Lanthimos’s brilliantly bonkers, marvellously feminist reworking of the Frankenstein myth, which gave Emma Stone a well-deserved Best Actress award, uses nakedness in a way that movies have forgotten, making the female body a sharp statement of ownership, and liberation.
Stone’s playing of Bella Baxter is stunning: In her billowing bell sleeves, bloomers (well done, costume department), and open hair falling well below her waist, she uses immaculate physical comedic notes — moving from jerky toddler movements to a filled-out personality — to embellish a woman who learns to live on her own terms. While Lily Gladstone from Martin Scorsese’s epic tale of the Osage people, Flowers Of The Killer Moon, would have been the politically correct choice (purely as representation, her inclusion in the cast is a 10 on 10, and it helps that she plays her wealthy Osage heiress Mollie Burkhart, who loses her heart to a cad, with grace), if Stone hadn’t got that Best Actress Oscar, it would have been an act of betrayal.
Unlike last year with its strong desi flavour — the Naatu-Naatu dance-off, MM Kreem brandishing his Best Original Song Oscar, and the beauteous Deepika Padukone on stage — this wasn’t an India year. In the Memoriam section, we got a brief flash of the famed art director Nitin Chandrakant Desai. And in the Feature Documentary category, Nisha Pahuja’s two- hour documentary on the fightback of a Jharkhand family against the rapists of a minor girl, was nominated. But this was always going to be the year of 20 Days In Mariupol, a moving account of the way the town’s people are being impacted by the on-going conflict in Ukraine.
Another war, the one being waged in Palestine, simmered and bubbled all through the evening, but with only one attendee making it a talking point. Jonathan Glazer, the director of the searing Nazi revisionist tale The Zone Of Interest, spoke of the victims of dehumanisation in both Israel and Gaza. It was a powerful, necessary intervention, even if momentary, in an evening so full of glitter and shine. As Mstyslav Chernov, director of 20 Days in Mariupol, said, “Cinema forms memories, and memories form histories.”The fact that it did get a mention will always be part of both memory and history.
shubhra.gupta@expressindia.com
The cast and crew of "Oppenheimer" accept the award for best picture during the Oscars on March 10, 2024, at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles. (AP) 
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