96th Academy Awards: 2024 Oscar for Best Picture goes to... Oppenheimer

Christopher Nolan on the sets of Oppenheimer, based on Kai Bird's Pulitzer-winning biography 'American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer'. (Image source: X/@OppenheimerFilm)

Oppenheimer has won seven of the 13 Oscars it was nominated for at the 96th Academy Awards at Dolby Theatre, Los Angeles, on March 10 (March 11 morning in India): Best Picture, Best Director (Christopher Nolan), Best Actor in a Leading Role (Cillian Murphy), Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Robert Downie Jr), Best Cinematography, Best Original Score, and Best Film Editing.

Oppenheimer Best Picture win at the 96th Oscars

Oppenheimer is a biopic on Robert Oppenheimer, the lead on America's Manhattan Project to develop the world's first atomic bomb. Christopher Nolan shot the film on IMAX format and on 65mm film.

Despite the stiff competition, film critics had predicted Oppenheimer for Best Picture Oscar, Cristopher Nolan for Best Director Oscar, Cillian Murphy for Best Actor in a Leading Role Oscar and Robert Downie Jr for Best Actor in a Supporting Role Oscar - based not just on this film, but as a culmination of years of great movie-making.

Nominated for an @TheAcademy Award for Best Supporting Actor, @robertdowneyjr gives “a shrewd, dynamic performance.” #Oppenheimer pic.twitter.com/lXhoAzbVkF— Oppenheimer (@OppenheimerFilm) February 7, 2024

Oscars Best Picture, among the most anticipated awards of the night, is decided by a ranked choice voting or preferential ballot. It is the only Oscar for which all 10,000-plus Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences members can vote - members rank the films from 1 to 10 based on their preference. If one of the films gets over 50 percent votes, it emerges as a clear winner. If not, the Academy removes the film with the least votes from contention, and redistributes the votes it got to the second choice the members that voted for that film indicated in their ballot, and so on till a clear majority winner emerges.

The average length of the top 10 movies in the 96th Oscars is 2 hours 23 minutes, Oscars host Jimmy Kimmel pointed out.

Hollywood's most glamorous were gathered in Los Angeles' Dolby Theatre—in their Loewe (Greta Lee) and Louis Vuitton gowns (5-time Oscar nominee Emma Stone); their Armani Prive and Bulgari (Zendaya); and their Versace (Margot Robbie) and Balenciaga outfits (Carrie Mulligan)—for the 96th Academy Awards, hosted for the fourth time by Jimmy Kimmel

Among the biggest awards of the night was the Best Picture prize. The nominees this year were Oppenheimer, Poor Things, The Holdovers, Maestro, Anatomy of a Fall, The Zone of Interest, American Fiction, Barbie, Past Lives, and Killers of the Flower Moon.

A second major contender for Best Picture going in to the 96th Academy Awards was Poor Things, a feminist sci-fi story that looks at what happens when a grown woman gets a clean state - an infant brain untrained in social norms or expectations.

Director Yorgos Lanthimos and actor-producer Emma Stone strike a delicious balance between the Frankensteinian doctor Dr Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe) who brings Bella back from the dead with an unconventional brain transplant and Dr Baxter's own story of losing one organ after another as his experimented on him to see which parts of the human body could be vestigial.

Poor Things was nominated for 11 Oscars, and won five, including Best Production Design and Best Make-up and Styling. Emma Stone won an Oscar for Best Actress for the second time in her career (the first was for La La Land).