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‘Oppenheimer’ Filmmaker Christopher Nolan Wins the 2024 Academy Award for Best Director

Pop the champagne

christopher nolan best director oscars winner
Kevin Winter/Getty Images

No movie would be complete without a mastermind behind the camera. 

Tonight, Hollywood’s biggest stars gathered in Los Angeles for the 96th annual Academy Awards. During the ceremony, Christopher Nolan took home the statuette for Best Director for his work on Oppenheimer.

The filmmaker was nominated against a slew of worthy contenders, including Martin Scorsese for Killers of the Flower Moon, Yorgos Lanthimos for Poor Things, Justine Triet for Anatomy of a Fall and Jonathan Glazer for The Zone of Interest.

christopher nolan best director oscars winner
Kevin Mazur/Getty Images

The Academy Award for Best Director has been around since the Oscars debuted in 1929, though it was originally divided into “Dramatic” and “Comedy” categories. In the last few years, the winners have made history—Chloé Zhao's win for Nomadland in 2021 made her only the second woman and the first female of Asian descent to win in this category. Meanwhile, in 2020, Bong Joon-ho's win for Parasite made him the first South Korean filmmaker to win the prize.

Other previous winners include Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert for Everything Everywhere All at Once, Jane Campion for The Power of the Dog, Alfonso Cuarón for Roma, Guillermo del Toro for The Shape of Water, Damien Chazelle for La La Land, Alejandro G. Iñárritu for The Revenant and Birdman, Ang Lee for Life of Pi, Michel Hazanavicius for The Artist, Tom Hooper for The King’s Speech, Kathryn Bigelow for The Hurt Locker, Danny Boyle for Slumdog Millionaire, Coen Brothers for No Country for Old Men and Martin Scorsese for The Departed.

Congratulations on a job well done.

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greta

Senior Editor

Greta Heggeness is a California-based editor at PureWow and has been writing about entertainment since 2015. She covers everything from awards shows to exclusive celebrity...