The Oscar race reckoning with the dark side of history
ALL THE ESSENTIAL, FROM HOLLYWOOD AND BEYOND
WITH A WAVE OF FILMS SPOTLIGHTING DEVASTATING WORLD EVENTS, AWARDS SEASON IS FULL OF THE HEAVIEST OF HITTERS
WORDS ALEX GODFREY
MARTA KOCHANEK
JANUARY 2024 | EDITED BY BETH WEBB
“AND NOW I am become death,” says Cillian Murphy’s J. Robert Oppenheimer, sizing up the apocalypse he has put in motion, gazing into the nuclear fire. “The destroyer of worlds.” And the blast takes hold.
“He was the most important man who ever lived,” director Christopher Nolan told Empire a couple of months before Oppenheimer’s release. “Whether you like it or not.” Nolan knows how to promote a film, but there’s a good case here: by developing the atomic bomb and, albeit indirectly, the hydrogen bomb, the theoretical physicist was responsible for potential planetary destruction. multiplexes, and it’s not alone. Destruction is in the air: as awards season kicks in, a slew of brilliant films about true stories are wrestling with monumental devastation, grappling with genocide, weighing up cultural carnage and posing difficult questions. With all of them expected to pick up multiple Oscar nominations, next March’s ceremony will see Hollywood reckoning with sins of the past.
Alongside Oppenheimer’s doom-laden dramatisation of the lead-up to the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there is Martin Scorsese’s Killers Of The Flower Moon, about white America’s massacre of many members of the Osage Nation; Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone Of Interest, which contrasts Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss’ domestic idyll with the deathly sounds of the concentration camp over his garden wall; and J.A. Bayona’s Society Of The Snow, chronicling the 1972 Andes plane crash which saw a group of people from Uruguay starving for months in the mountains, resorting to cannibalism.