“It wasn’t that much of a rivalry,” joked Emily Blunt, during a bit of onstage cross-talk with Ryan Gosling at the Oscars – and she wasn’t far wrong when it came to winning awards. Blunt, who appeared in Oppenheimer and was nominated for best supporting actress, and Gosling, the now legendary Ken in Barbie, traded a few gags at the microphone, but there was no getting away from the reality: as far as the Oscars were concerned, the A-bomb film had nuked the walking-talking-doll movie.
A winner in seven categories including best film, best director and best actor, Oppenheimer is the first authentic blockbuster to dominate the Academy Awards since The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King in 2004. Its $960m worldwide box office dwarfs such apparently “popular” films as Everything Everywhere All at Once ($111m) and Argo ($227m). While it’s fair to point out, as Gosling did, that it rode “Barbie’s coat tails all summer” as part of #Barbenheimer, Oppenheimer’s box office results are possibly even more impressive than Barbie’s $1.4bn, given the essentially dour nature of its narrative and themes, and its three-hour running time.
