Christopher Nolan

Worst Best Picture: Is Oppenheimer Better or Worse Than Crash?

In “Worst Best Picture” we search every single Best Picture Oscar winner of all time from 1927 to present to uncover the worst of them all. Conventional wisdom says that 2005’s winner Crash is the worst winner in history. We won’t stop until we’ve tested every last one. Read the the first, our review of Crash, here. Posts will be relatively spoiler free, but there may be some details revealed. Today’s installment is the 2024 winner Oppenheimer. Is it better than Crash?

This was the best year for the Oscars in decades. Top to bottom, this year’s films were better than any year in recent memory and you have to go back a very long time to start to get into years where, for the most part, the movies are excellent and the good ones win. That shouldn’t be as remarkable as it is, but this is the state of play.

Everyone brings their own perspective to the Oscars and that inherently makes a contest where we reward specific art as better than other art a silly premise. If Barbie reinvigorated your love of cinema then you are going to be frustrated when it does not do well during awards season. If you didn’t see Killers of the Flower Moon or Oppenheimer, then you are going to roll your eyes when the super-serious, over-the-top dramatic seemingly typical fare is nominated for everything. It helps to remember that when engaging with the reactions to the months of awards and the fallout, pun not necessarily intended.

The best movie that came out this year was The Zone of Interest, and I will go so far as to say that I think, maybe, it is the best movie ever made, period. I’ve never seen anything like that in a theater and I have never had something stick with me the way that movie did. I don’t think a lot of people saw it, compared to most of the stuff this year, and I don’t think it’s the kind of thing that would win, anyway. I just want to take a moment to acknowledge it and to encourage you to see it. I realize that talk is cheap and hyperbole is the bread-and-butter of this series, but at least today, I don’t think you can make a list of great modern movies without starting with The Zone of Interest.

But the reason I say this year’s Oscars are so special is that the Best Picture list, with the notable and specific exception of Maestro, is one of the best ever assembled. Nine of the ten pictures are worth your time and that, frankly, is a miracle. Maestro is a miserable, frustrating experience that seemingly forgets instantly that it is intended to be a movie about music. It was widely panned, somewhat because of Bradley Cooper’s level of earnestness that people do not seem to respect or believe, but I am still glad to see it blank the evening with zero awards. Bradley Cooper has made great work and will make it again, but we should not reward people for Doing a Lot of Acting. The last decade of Oscars is full of embarrassing stuff that looks a lot like Maestro, so part of me was a little surprised to see it flame out.

But after that, you’re left with a long list of great films to see. Even Past Lives, which I found a little slight and a little ridiculous with undeveloped characters, is sweet and seems to have worked for most folks that saw it. Movies like Poor Things and Anatomy of a Fall would clean up even more than they did in other years. American Fiction and The Holdovers are remarkable films with incredible lead performances. Barbie was a phenomenon for a reason. Killers of the Flower Moon would win it all in some years. This is just a very hard year and that’s very good news.

So, now, we come to it. It’s been inevitable for weeks, which does tend to take some of the shine off the apple. Oppenheimer is a fantastic, epic film. It made a billion dollars and it convincingly showcased both an atomic bomb blast and the horrors of living with making the world a demonstrably worse place. Christopher Nolan has made a lot of movies I’ve liked (and some other ones) and the cast here is second-to-none. It was destined for this moment and it was so obvious that it wasn’t even really that upsetting when Al Pacino just sorta blurted out that it won at the end of an, honestly, pretty good Oscars ceremony. Everyone knew this was happening and then everyone accepted it with grace when it did.

I saw Oppenheimer in the theater and it seemed fine, but it took a second watch to make it really click all the tumblers into place in my head. Once you’re prepared for the pacing and you’re watching Cillian Murphy’s haunted performance for what it is, it feels less like the movie you expect it to be and more like the movie it is. This is, sure, the story of a man who made a bomb and lost his security clearance and all that, but it’s more primal than that. This is the story of living with the consequences of you getting what you want. This is the final shot of The Graduate, but with global stakes and years and years to see it coming and do nothing to stop it.

It’s also an extremely brave movie in several respects. On the one hand, it’s insane that the bomb itself goes off not as a climax, but as another event that drives on what we’re actually talking about. On another hand, it’s insane how often we see what would be unimportant, secondary motivational conversations in another movie but are the actual damn plot in this one. Nolan proves a point, again and again, that “save the world with the bomb” is not actually as motivating as the personal, real, experienced stakes are for these characters. A character jokes with Murphy that the world is hostile to their kind and he half-jokingly proposes an answer of “physicists?” It would be a bold joke to be visited once, but it’s the core of the movie. We’re fighting Hitler, not just because Hitler is bad, but because of something more core to who “we” are.

It’s going to strike a lot of people as a boring choice. It did hit me that way, at first, but I think it’s worth sitting with it if you feel that way. I think what Nolan has done here is remarkable primarily because the premise of this is not really that interesting, but the thing he’s delivered is a shocking version of that premise. When you look back over the best modern winners, you find movies like Spotlight. There’s nothing about Spotlight that inherently seems like it would be memorable, but I still remember the transformative element of watching the reporters get frustrated over the coverage and the reality that they were going to struggle to enact real change against a monolithic entity. The ability to tell the basic story makes it a good movie, but the fact that you feel that secondary thing happening makes it a great one.

Oppenheimer is not the best movie to ever win Best Picture, but it’s a real masterpiece that feels important and is important. It helps to watch movies like Maestro to understand why this particular magic trick is so hard. This is a movie where the main character goes out to a field to talk to literally Albert Einstein about literally math. This is not inherently going to be interesting, but the score spurs you on and the stakes feel tremendous without a lot of bullshit. Maestro is constantly telling you how important, how special, how meaningful all this is, but Oppenheimer trusts that you’ll sort that out on your own when you see it on the screen. Oppenheimer may not be an inspired choice for the award, but it’s a deserving one, and you have a handful of examples of what the bad version looks like, should you need them.

The Best Part: Cillian Murphy is incredible, splitting the difference between moody, too-smart asshole and worried, fearful nightmare. Best Actor has been a bit of a disaster for the last decade or so, with few exceptions, but this year it was so obvious and so excellent and especially in a rewatch you really notice how incredibly he sells the tonal shifts that make this movie work.

The Worst Part: I don’t think either of the women in Oppenheimer’s life get enough time to really shine. Emily Blunt and Florence Pugh are functionally barely in this movie. I don’t know that you really need to change anything and it’s already three hours long, but even on a rewatch it feels like so much is conveyed across a cast of fifty people and yet we really do not spend very much time at all with them.

Is It Better or Worse than Crash? Loads better. I’ve obviously slammed Maestro a lot here and I think it is a flawed movie, but even the worst stuff this year deserves some attention. Nyad is a weird experience because it is unwilling to confront the obvious lies in the real person’s story and May December did not work for me as a campy experience, but even those movies, messy as they are, are not worthy of the Crash comparison. This year’s Oscar crop is the best since 2007, I think, and that takes some of the fun out of this premise. I have faith, though. Next year, I bet we’ll see something truly horrid get nominated. I can’t wait.

Worst Best Picture Archives: Crash | Terms of Endearment | Forrest Gump | All About Eve | The Apartment | No Country for Old Men | Gentleman’s Agreement | 12 Years a Slave | The Last Emperor | The Silence of the Lambs | The Artist | A Man for All Seasons | Platoon | The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King | The King’s Speech | Rain Man | The Departed | The Bridge on the River Kwai | Marty | Gigi | It Happened One Night | Driving Miss Daisy | Shakespeare in Love | Wings | Midnight Cowboy | Rocky | Gone with the Wind | Chicago | Gladiator | Cavalcade | The Greatest Show on Earth | You Can’t Take It With You | The Best Years of Our Lives | The Godfather| Casablanca | Grand Hotel | Kramer vs. Kramer | The French Connection | In the Heat of the Night | An American in Paris | Patton | Mrs. Miniver | Amadeus | Crash, Revisited | How Green Was My Valley | American Beauty | West Side Story | The Sting | Tom Jones | Dances with Wolves | Going My Way | The Hurt Locker | The Life of Emile Zola | Slumdog Millionaire | The Deer Hunter | Around the World in 80 Days  | Chariots of Fire | Mutiny on the Bounty | Argo | From Here to Eternity | Ordinary People | The Lost Weekend | All the King’s Men | Rebecca | A Beautiful Mind | Titanic | The Broadway Melody | The Sound of Music | On the Waterfront | Unforgiven | Million Dollar Baby | My Fair Lady | Hamlet | Braveheart | Oliver! | The English Patient | Lawrence of Arabia | Cimarron | One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest | All Quiet on the Western Front | The Great Ziegfeld | Out of Africa | Schindler’s List | Gandhi | Ben-Hur | The Godfather Part II | Annie Hall | Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) | Spotlight | Moonlight | The Shape of Water | Green Book | Parasite | Nomadland | CODA | Everything Everywhere All at Once | Oppenheimer

Alex Russell lives in Chicago and is set in his ways. Disagree with him about anything at readingatrecess@gmail.com or on Twitter at @alexbad.

Is Paprika the Best Movie of All Time?

This is Best Movie of All Time, an eternal search for the greatest film ever. Read the full archives here.

Where do you start on search for the greatest movie of all time? The temptation to start with Citizen Kane or something similar is strong, but I am going to start with an anime. Wait, c’mon, stick around. I promise, this is all about something you’ve seen. No, really! Just read to the end.

I’m more comfortable talking about things I don’t like than things I do like. I spent a year watching every single movie that ever won Best Picture at the Oscars just to dunk on Crash, which I still think is the worst movie to ever win the Academy’s most prestigious award. Crash opens with a discussion of coffee and spaghetti. I really can’t get into it here, you can read my 90+ part series if you want to know more.

Crash is not the worst movie I’ve ever seen. I grant that title to mother!, which makes me mad to even stylize that way, but director Darren Aronofsky insists that it is lowercase and ends in an exclamation because that symbolizes the climax. I am not going to spend much time on it, but the audience in the theater when I saw it literally laughed and booed at mother! and they were right to do so. It’s a disaster and a divisive allegory that may not be the worst movie ever made, but it’s certainly the experience I enjoyed the least. Aronofsky says it’s about environmentalism, but that seems like an impossible reading of a movie about the power of creative people and how they misuse it. I could spend forever on this, but I’ll just leave my cards on the table and say that’s the bottom of the barrel for me.

I mention it because I think Darren Aronofsky is a great director. Pi is haunting, even all these years later. Requiem for a Dream is a masterpiece. But I want to talk about Black Swan.

Black Swan is a movie about ambition. You’ve probably seen it, but even if you haven’t we aren’t going to spend much time on it. It’s about a ballerina trying to reach professional heights and the fears and challenges that come along with that journey. It deserves a lot more space, but this is all an introduction to another movie. It’s not even an Aronofsky movie! What are we doing?

Black Swan is not a shot-for-shot remake, but it borrows really, really heavily from the anime Perfect Blue. You can watch YouTube essays if you want to know more, but it’s enough to say that Perfect Blue is a horror movie about a star reaching for more and finding the journey more complex than anticipated. It’s definitely not a “rip off” or anything, but it’s clear that Aronofsky saw Perfect Blue and made his own version. He says that’s not what happened, but you can watch for yourself. Black Swan is an excellent movie and I don’t personally think it matters that he got some inspiration from an anime, but he seems to be pretty touchy about it.

This is how we get to Paprika. Satoshi Kon directed both Perfect Blue and Paprika, among other movies and series, and he was asked about the similarities in major Hollywood fare and his movies somewhat often. You can look up his reactions, but it seems to me like he always acknowledged the similarities but didn’t seem to care. Quentin Tarantino has made an entire career out of “homage” which can border on “theft” and directors seem to do the same thing to Kon.

Inception steals some images directly from Paprika. Several content creators have done a better job than I could do proving it, but the most striking is a scene where Elliot Page approaches a mirror and ruins the illusion of the dream in Inception. This is directly, exactly, lifted from Paprika, where it happens for the same reason. Does that matter? It’s weird, to be sure, especially if you’ve seen Paprika first.

I hated Inception when I saw it new. It felt impossible to follow and it felt deliberately messy. I rewatched it this year and liked it a great deal more, but it still feels like it forces you to look really closely at the magic eye drawing it presents and it doesn’t necessarily reward you for “getting it” so much as it does string you along. I am finding myself less and less interested in what Christopher Nolan has to say as a filmmaker, but even with that caveat I think Inception is better as an action movie than it is as a puzzle.

Paprika, then. It’s an anime from 2006, from Satoshi Kon, who also made Perfect Blue, Tokyo Godfathers, and Millennium Actress. Paprika is about a technology that allows people to go inside dreams. Inception is deeply concerned with the “how” and spends a tremendous amount of time making sure you follow how it’s all possible. Paprika doesn’t give a damn. Put this headset on, it’s time for a parade.

I think that’s why Paprika works. It’s enough that we buy that this is possible because some handwaving, technical explanations from science-types tells us it’s possible. That’s how it would actually work, anyway. We wouldn’t need someone to take us in a dream and tell us a long story about the physics of dreams, we’d just see it on Twitter and accept it. Paprika spends more time on the experience and ends up being a more enjoyable film as a result.

Christopher Nolan clearly saw Paprika. Both movies are about going in dreams and solving a problem. Both movies are about getting lost in an experience. Both movies are about the hero being the one person who can navigate this impossible, mysterious space. But it all kinda ends there.

Inception is dark and horrible. Everything is black and gray. Everyone has an assault riffle and everyone works for a shady military organization. Everyone has a tie. Everything is Extremely Serious All The Time. That’s Christopher Nolan’s whole aesthetic and it seems to be working for him, Tenet excluded.

The character Paprika in Paprika is the dream avatar of our main heroine and it works exactly like Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in Inception. The difference is that she seems to be still having fun with it, transforming into multiple forms and dancing around in a red shirt and constantly smirking through the dreams she invades. The tone isn’t all that different in the two movies, but the presentation couldn’t be more different. The nightmare in Paprika isn’t a train crashing through a city block, it’s a parade of frogs and statues that sings a happy nonsense tune. It’s dire, obviously, but what fun!

If Inception has a message, it seems to be that dreams are sacred. Our characters muck around in someone else’s experience and are forever changed. Paprika also wonders if this is something we all should be doing, but finds a slightly different answer. Satoshi Kon isn’t Christopher Nolan, but you probably got that from the box art. I recommend you watch both. It’s a better transformation than Aronofsky was able to make, at least.

Paprika is all about the visuals. It’s an explosion, from start to finish, and the logic behind it never really matters all that much. We learn about the bad guy late in the narrative and his motives never go beyond surface level. It’s all about what you see and how they render it. Anime can tell a story, obviously, but it is best when it does so in a way that live action cannot. The medium matters here and I think it’s a great first watch even if you’re not the kind of person that would normally watch something like this. Christopher Nolan certainly did.

Is it better than the last movie we looked at? It is the first one. In future entries, we’ll answer this question, starting with Paprika.

Is it the best movie of all time? It is the first one we’ve looked at, so yes, for now, Paprika is the best movie of all time.

You can watch Paprika on Amazon for $2.99, at the time of this writing. You can also watch Inception for free on Amazon (if you have Prime). You can recommend a movie to me for this series through email at readingatrecess @ gmail.com or on Twitter @alexbad and I will watch it, no matter what. Try to pick something good.