Why Did The Best Film Not Win Best Film At The Oscars 2023?
And Why ‘Oppenheimer’ Will Win In 2024
I predicted All Quiet on the Western Front would win Best Film 2023. But I was wrong. I have been wrong before. It has happened. I admit I got the call wrong. It was won by some film about parallel universes starring Michelle Yeoh who is with a guy who I last saw acting as a little boy — as it was 40 years ago — with a man who had a natty hat just like Robert Oppenheimer (see above). They were both Doctors. Not medical Doctors but both explorers in their fields — one archaeology, the other physics.
Damn. Hollywood is a tough place to work for certain ethnicities and age groups. The awards seemed to make older people feel young and worthy again and refugees feel wanted again. I don’t mind that at all. It is rather nice but what has it got to do with Best Film?
I thought the winning film was awful. I only got as far as Jamie Curtis getting beaten up by Michelle Yeoh and the little lad from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) fighting the security guards with his bumbag. I swear at one moment I heard him calling for “Indy Indy” to come and save the day but he needed no help it seems. I really couldn’t take anymore so I stopped watching. I may try again but I will wait until it is shown on the TV and maybe I will enjoy it. Maybe the war in Ukraine will be over too?
But AQOTWF should have won. And the reason why it did not was that it is an anti-war film. It does not glorify war nor does it glorify the sacrifices made in war. War is nothing but existential horror. And responsible for millions and millions and millions of refugees throughout human history. The flux never stops. Stop wars and you will eliminate so much displacement and dislocation and human suffering.
Hollywood in 2023 had no time for films at the moment that show war in all its bloody futility. The American hegemony is under serious threat from an alliance of Russia and China. So they want heroes and villains and war as an ennobling activity of a people, to fit in with the attitude in America towards Putin as the new Hitler and President Xi as the new Chairman Mao in a very smart beautifully tailored business suit?
We must fight again to stop Hitler who has been transposed by the war in Ukraine as Putin. The war in Ukraine is a patriotic and powerful expression of the fight of a people against invasion and Putin’s tyranny. A film that shows how war solves absolutely nothing is not getting our vote.
And that it is based upon a German book and has German actors is a disgrace to WW1, WW2, and Ukraine not to mention the Vietnam War if I am really pushed to defend my vote for a parallel universe.
And that’s where I felt I was when the announcement of Best Film was made. In a parallel universe where hatred of war is elided and peace is scorned as being anti-patriotic or facilitating the rise of Hitler/Putin. Hollywood does not want to face reality and see the greatness of a film that once again warns us of the devastating consequences of war upon a people a country and human civilization. It is asking us and begging us over 100 years later to find the solution to war via peaceful mechanisms. This is the only way humanity has a future.
Because we have been lucky so far. Hitler did not have nuclear weapons but today we are covered by nukes on land, in the air, and the sea. There is no escape. Unless you know a way into a parallel universe? And yet Oppenheimer will sweep the Oscars away in 2024. The film shows how the first atomic bomb — and second — were created in the desert by Dr. Robert Oppenheimer and the scientists he had assembled to turn theory into practice. The author of the book from which Christopher Nolan’s movie was adapted named Dr. Oppenheimer as the ‘American Prometheus’. Rightly so, as he did steal ‘fire’ — nuclear fission — from the Gods to give the American war machine the most powerful weapon in human history.
The film is about how he was so shabbily treated and rejected by the American Establishment for his communist sympathies even though he had given them such power. Oppenheimer became the target of the Communist witch-hunts that pervaded American society when Hitler and Japan were defeated and Stalin became the new Hitler in ‘The Cold War’ narrative. America always requires an enemy — internally and externally — in each generation to justify its military/police aggression and targeted regime change.
However, his smearing and character assassination based on paranoia and the fear of his views on the threat of nuclear annihilation has much in common with All Quiet On The Western Front last year’s missed opportunity by Hollywood. Oppenheimer is to all intents and purposes an anti-war film that does attempt — through the titular figure and briefly with one or two others like Teller — to engage with the moral dilemma of war.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing and we know just how apocalyptic was the creation of this God-like weaponised power. But Oppenheimer and others at Los Alamos knew its destructive potential just from the theory and yet they chose to build it before the Nazis or the Japanese did. Do we acknowledge them for saving Western liberal democracy? Or do we condemn them for creating the power to wipe away human civilisation?
That for me is the essence of Oppenheimer. It is a perfectly nuanced portrayal of our existential predicament of walking the tightrope of annihilation by nuclear war. Christopher Nolan and Cillian Murphy as Oppenheimer — his transformation is one of the great cinematic performances — entertainingly and beautifully show the audience how the ‘American Prometheus’ created the possibility of human extinction and was then deemed a threat to national security because he realised the enormity of his mistake and would not be politically silenced.
That is why Oppenheimer will win ‘Best Film’ at the 2024 Oscar Ceremony next week.