JANUARY 26 — It’s that time of the year again — the Oscars are upon us. It will be the 90th annual Academy Awards and I for one do not expect many surprises.
I really believe it will be Christopher Nolan’s year. It has to be his time. Also, the Oscars have a certain pattern to them.
Last year, it was the straight out of left field Moonlight! No one expected that film to swoop straight in but it did, beating favourites like La La Land and Manchester By The Sea. This year is the year of the epic and I’m fairly certain that Dunkirk will clinch the prize.
It is also Christopher Nolan’s time to win. Like Leonardo DiCaprio’s time when he won for The Revenant or Denzel’s time when he won for Training Day. There just comes a time for Oscar nominees when the Academy simply cannot say no anymore.
Nolan is a favourite among the superhero fans with his Batman trilogy. He truly revived the series in 2005 with Batman Begins.
I was quite taken with his dark interpretation of the superhero and of course, when The Dark Knight came in 2008 (yes, with the late Heath Ledger as Joker!) fans all over the over the world thought that Nolan’s Batman was the best ever, even better than Tim Burton’s in 1989!
But that’s not where Nolan’s talent ends. Besides being a great director he also wrote films like The Prestige in 2006 (spoilers ahead!). While being an awesome director is already a great accomplishment in itself, being a writer as well is truly difficult to achieve.
The Prestige was a complex movie to write with a very intricate plot. It tells the story of two magicians who try to outdo each other.
Finally, one of them outdoes the other by seemingly being able to teleport and the other magician goes to the ends of the earth (literally!) to try to discover his secret.
He finally chooses cloning as a means of faking teleportation at the expense of killing off his clone every time the trick is performed.
However, we finally discover that the first magician had no real “trick’, he was just using his twin brother to deceive his audience! Only a brilliant writer could have come up with this ending!
Of course, Nolan also wrote the much lampooned Inception (Michael Scott from The Office quipped ‘I saw it or at least I thought I did!’) in 2010.
While it was not ground breaking in the sci-fi genre (films like USSR’S Solyaris from 1972 did it more for me, I think!), it certainly added some much needed depth to the sci fi genre.
Furthermore, it took this depth to box office success. No mean feat indeed. It also cemented Nolan as the master of the ambiguous ending. Not inadvertently, mind you. No, he actually wanted to be ambiguous. I remember coming home from watching the film with my brothers, debating what actually happened at the end. We settled on checking with IMDB only to find that the discussions on the ending spanned pages and pages!
Nolan has already been nominated twice before, for the aforementioned Inception and for Memento (2002) which was also a triumph of writing. It is difficult to see why he has not won but I predict that Dunkirk will be his triumph. After all, the legendary Spielberg won for something very similar just under 20 years ago — the inimitable Saving Private Ryan!
* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
