When Oppenheimer star Robert Downey Jr collected his Golden Globe for finest supporting actor final week, he mirrored on what an unlikely success the film had been.

“A sweeping story about the ethical dilemma of nuclear weapons grosses $1bn?” he joked of the movie, which admittedly hadn’t sounded punter-friendly on paper.

“But Universal [Pictures] went all in,” the actor continued, “on Christopher Nolan… and this cast and crew, and helped them render a masterpiece.”

Oppenheimer now appears to be like simply as prone to conquer awards season because it did the 2023 summer time field workplace.

Nolan’s three-hour epic in regards to the father of the atomic bomb, J Robert Oppenheimer, has scored 4 Screen Actors Guild nominations and can doubtless function closely when the Bafta Film Awards announce their shortlists this week.

The Oscar nominations will comply with on 23 January. While Downey Jr is a frontrunner for finest supporting actor, his co-stars Cillian Murphy and Emily Blunt are additionally prone to be nominated for main actor and supporting actress respectively.

To date, Oppenheimer has grossed $958m (£753m) – and that is not even its remaining whole, because the movie has been been re-released in Imax this month.

Although the film would have been on the Academy’s radar anyway due to its creative worth, that stage of field workplace success can provide an awards marketing campaign a major increase, as voting our bodies are eager to indicate gratitude to the movies which saved cinemas afloat.

That helps make Oppenheimer simply the form of movie the Academy can get behind – it occupies the candy spot between creative benefit and business success.

While most of the final decade’s field workplace juggernauts have been largely ignored by the Academy – together with the overwhelming majority of Marvel movies – rewarding Oppenheimer can be a means of acknowledging business success whereas making certain the Oscars’ fame for recognising high quality stayed intact.

So how did such a cerebral movie a couple of tortured theoretical physicist tempt such nice swathes of the general public – now accustomed to watching movies at house – out to the theatres?

A giant a part of the reply, in fact, is Barbie.

The Barbenheimer phenomenon swept the world in the summertime of 2023. The two movies helped one another on the field workplace exactly as a result of they’d been launched on the identical day.

Doctored footage combining the movies two posters went viral, as did cinema seating plans, showtime schedules, and debates about which movie to see first.

On the eventual launch date, 21 July, followers raced to see the explosion of pink and plastic that was Barbie, earlier than occurring to observe a really totally different form of explosion, and its devastating aftermath, in Oppenheimer.

Both movies have been virtually immediately deemed finest image contenders and obtained vital acclaim. In a five-star evaluate, The Telegraph’s Robbie Collin said: “Nolan’s portrait of the father of the nuclear bomb is a triumph, like witnessing history itself being split open.”

It’s price saying, although, that Oppenheimer was to not everybody’s style.

The prime grievance from many ticket-buyers was that they couldn’t hear the dialogue. This is an everyday criticism of Nolan – characters in his movies typically mumble or are drowned out by background noise.

Most administrators punch up the audio in publish manufacturing utilizing a course of known as automated dialogue alternative (ADR), which sees actors re-record a few of their traces in a recording studio after filming has wrapped. But not Nolan.

Following the criticism, he told Business Insider: “I like to use the performance that was given in the moment rather than the actor revoice it later. Which is an artistic choice that some people disagree with, and that’s their right.”

(Personally, we advocate monitoring down subtitled screenings.)

Another topic of debate was the runtime. In an awards season that additionally contains Martin Scorsese’s 3.5-hour Killers of the Flower Moon, many stated administrators should be extra prepared to chop the period of their movies.

Oscars pundit Joey Nolfi of The Awardist podcast suggested lots of this yr’s movies don’t earn their runtime, including: “Oppenheimer is the worst offender of the year. The first 30 minutes and last hour of that movie, I was actively angry.”

The third hour of Oppenheimer sees the movie go in a distinct course. In the aftermath of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the physicist grapples together with his guilt at a sequence of hearings held in drab assembly rooms.

“The last hour could have been a title card summarising what happened,” Nolfi steered, solely half joking. “And it turned into a completely different film.”

Nonetheless, Oppenheimer continued to surge as awards season heated up.

The incontrovertible fact that Oppenheimer’s field workplace success owes a lot to its hyperlink with Barbie is ironic, and happened due to chain of occasions set off by the discharge of Nolan’s earlier movie Tenet throughout the Covid pandemic.

Nolan had a long-standing relationship with Warner Brothers, relationship again to his 2002 movie Insomnia. Every movie he made after that for the subsequent 20 years was with the identical studio, together with The Dark Knight, Inception, Interstellar and Dunkirk.

The director caught with Warner Bros for his 2020 movie Tenet – a time-bending thriller starring John David Washington. But his tenth collaboration with the studio turned out to be the final.

Tenet was launched in a summer time the place movie firms have been grappling with worldwide lockdowns and populations nervous about returning to cinemas.

As a consequence, Warner Bros introduced in late 2020 they might be drastically altering their rollout model for movies launched within the following yr. The firm stated it could considerably shorten the theatrical window, and in lots of circumstances launch movies in cinemas and on streaming service HBO Max on the identical day.

The move enraged Nolan – a cinema lover to his bones. As a direct results of the corporate’s new technique, he stated he would depart Warner Bros and take his subsequent movie to the corporate’s rival Universal. That movie was Oppenheimer.

Ironically, his outdated studio, Warner Bros, then by chance made Nolan’s new movie, together with his new studio, extra profitable by scheduling the Barbie movie in opposition to it, thus creating the Barbenheimer phenomenon – the viral development no one noticed coming.

But in fact, it was mutually useful – and Barbenheimer helped Barbie on the field workplace simply as a lot because it did Oppenheimer.

With awards buzz rising, can something cease Oppenheimer’s Oscars glory?

Unlike different classes, finest image is determined by a preferential poll, the place voters rank the nominated movies so as of choice.

Some voters’ dislike of Oppenheimer may imply the highest prize goes to a extra consensus selection. The Holdovers, Poor Things and, in fact, Barbie, are among the many main threats.

There’s additionally no assure Murphy will repeat his Globes win on the Academy Awards. Best actor is especially crowded this yr and Paul Giamatti, Jeffrey Wright, Colman Domingo, Leonardo DiCaprio and Bradley Cooper are additionally robust contenders.

Blunt can also be unlikely to win her class – as The Holdovers star Da’Vine Joy Randolph has dominated finest supporting actress at precursor ceremonies.

While Oppenheimer movie will doubtless decide up some technical prizes, it may end up that Downey Jr. is the movie’s finest hope of what is often known as an “above-the-line” win.

But that is awards season. Nobody is aware of something for positive, and there may nonetheless be many twists and turns between now and the Oscars on 10 March.

Some success for for the movie is probably going, however not assured. To quote one in all Oppenheimer’s most memorable traces – concept will solely take us to this point.