Does Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep herald a return to Hollywood’s macho ‘dad movie’ days?

Christopher Nolan’s nuclear biopic has been crowned as the definitive winner of this year’s awards season. The three-hour biopic is quintessentially ‘one for the guys’, writes Louis Chilton – and represents everything the Oscars have been trying for years to move away from

Bombs for the boys: Cillian Murphy as the titular scientist in ‘Oppenheimer’ (Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal )

After a compelling seven-win sweep at the Oscars, Christopher Nolan’s propulsive three-hour drama has been cemented as the darling of this year’s awards season, pipping competitors such as Leonard Bernstein biopic Maestro and colourful doll-based comedy Barbie. There’s no doubt now that 2024 is indeed Oppenheimer’s year, and the film is a deserving victor. It’s a meaty, intelligent and wonderfully crafted piece of work – a career high for Nolan and its lead Cillian Murphy, who plays atomic bomb creator J Robert Oppenheimer. And yet, there’s something about the idea of an Oppenheimer win that feels strangely backwards-facing.

Oppenheimer, so the argument goes, is a film for men. Perhaps intensified by its strange and ubiquitous juxtaposition with the women-led Barbie, Nolan’s film has been scrutinised extensively through the lens of gender. No matter how reductive this assertion may be – that Nolan’s film is simply “one for the boys” – it’s hard to deny there’s a degree of truth to it. The few female roles that Oppenheimer does feature are hardly forefronted: Emily Blunt’s Kitty Oppenheimer never quite feels three-dimensional, and Florence Pugh makes the most of scant screentime as “other woman” Jean Tatlock. The roster of significant male characters, meanwhile, is deep and illustrious. Murphy fronts a cast that includes Robert Downey Jr, Matt Damon, Josh Hartnett, Casey Affleck, Jason Clarke, David Krumholtz, Rami Malek, Matthew Modine, Gary Oldman and Kenneth Branagh. Match this with Oppenheimer’s stereotypically male subject matter – bombs and the evils of war – and it’s easy to see why the film has been pigeonholed as a quintessential “dad movie”.

Historically, films like Oppenheimer – films that are grand, serious and bullishly male-focused – have been prime candidates for awards glory. The 1970s saw a historic run of “dad movie” supremacy, with Patton, The French Connection, The Godfather, The Sting, The Godfather Part II, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Rocky taking the top gongs across seven consecutive years. But this is no longer de rigeur. The past few years have seen a change in the make-up of Oscar winners, one driven by an expansion and diversification of the Academy’s voting base. A number of significant milestones have rattled by: first foreign-language film to win Best Picture (Parasite), first Asian woman to win Best Director (Nomadland’s Chloe Zhao); first deaf actor to win an award (CODA’s Troy Kotsur). There is a growing sense that, while the Oscars are still a pretty flawed barometer of the year’s best films, they are slowly becoming more open-minded and forward-thinking in their choices. Oppenheimer would be an anomaly after a half-decade that has seen Best Picture go to ostensible underdogs such as Nomadland, Parasite and Everything Everywhere All at Once.

The optics of an Oppenheimer sweep would be far from ideal, but the merits of it would be difficult to argue against

There is, too, a certain amount of overstatement in the suggestion that Oppenheimer is some sort of Entourage-esque bro-down. For all the criticisms of Blunt’s role (one tweet memorably referred to her as a “sentient martini glass”), there is work of value and sophistication in her performance. Towards the end, in one of the many scenes set during Oppenheimer’s 1954 security hearing, Blunt is given an opportunity to shine, one that she grabs with both hands. Her steely, unexpected evisceration of the government interrogators seems to come out of nowhere, and ends up being one of the film’s most memorable and talked-about sequences. While there are very real and legitimate issues to be had with Oppenheimer’s gender politics, criticisms of the Kitty Oppenheimer character have been decidedly overstated.

All things considered, it would be silly to begrudge Oppenheimer its moment in the sun. The recent push away from male-dominated norms is a necessary corrective to a century of industry sexism, but there will always be a space for the very best men-centric films to occupy. And by nearly all traditional filmmaking metrics – writing, acting, editing, directing, sound design, cinematography – Oppenheimer is a superlative achievement. There have, of course, been other first-rate films this year that don’t fit the macho mould, such as Justine Triet’s intense courtroom drama Anatomy of a Fall, but none that conclusively outshone Nolan’s opus.

The optics of an Oppenheimer sweep would be far from ideal, but the merits of it would be difficult to argue against. It would also be a roundly popular winner: the film ended up as the third-biggest release of 2023, grossing more than $1bn, while many see Nolan, the preeminent blockbuster filmmaker of his generation, as someone who is overdue critical plaudits. Would it constitute a predictable return to the macho norm? Maybe. But a worthy winner nonetheless.