And the 2024 Oscar goes to...
Oppenheimer, which took home the Best Picture prize at the Academy Awards on March 10. (Check out the full list of winners here.)
The J. Robert Oppenheimer biopic—which stars Cillian Murphy, Robert Downey Jr., Emily Blunt, Matt Damon and Florence Pugh—beat out nominees American Fiction, Anatomy of a Fall, Barbie, The Holdovers, Killers of the Flower Moon, Maestro, Past Lives, Poor Things and The Zone of Interest for the honor.
The victory came after director Christopher Nolan won his first-ever Best Director Oscar. In the acting categories, Murphy nabbed the Best Actor prize, while RDJ was honored with the title of Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role.
"Any of us who make movies know that you kind of dream of this moment," Oppenheimer producer Emma Thomas—who is married to Nolan—told the crowd. "I have dreaming about this moment for so long, but it seemed so unlikely that it would ever actually happened. And now I'm standing here, everything's kind of gone out of my head."
But before the award was handed out, this year's Best Picture nominations already made history. After all, this was the first time three movies directed by women—Greta Gerwig's Barbie, Justine Triet's Anatomy of a Fall and Celine Song's Past Lives—were simultaneously up for the Oscars' biggest prize. (Only two women-helmed films have ever won Best Picture: Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker in 2010 and Chloé Zhao's Nomadland in 2021.)
Two married couples also saw nominations as colleagues, with Margot Robbie and Tom Ackerley as well as Nolan and Thomas receiving producer nods for Barbie and Oppenheimer, respectively. (Or "Barbenheimer," if you will.)
Oppenheimer's Best Picture Oscar caps off its sweeping award season, during which the movie also won prizes at the Golden Globes, SAG Awards, Critics Choice Awards, BAFTA Film Awards, DGA Awards and PGA Awards.
However, Nolan has always been a firm believer that a powerful story trumps any golden statuette.
"It's always a tricky thing to try to analyze the zeitgeist or analyze success," he said of Oppenheimer in a January interview with Associated Press. "I keep coming back to the unique nature of the story. I think it is one of the great American stories. It encompasses so much that's important and dramatic about our history. That gives audiences a lot to hang to, when you get a great group of actors and incredible cast like we have, you can make this feel real and emotionally accessible."
He added, "Beyond that, sometimes you catch a wave and it's a wonderful and unique thing."
To see who else won big at the Oscars, keep reading.