In one of the most prestigious Oscar seasons in history, “Oppenheimer” won seven Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director. With “Godzilla Minus One” by director Takashi Yamazaki, a Japanese film received a special effects Oscar for the first time, beating out “Mission: Impossible 7” and “Napoleon”, among others. This was the first Oscar for a “Godzilla” film.
Since his cinematic debut “Godzilla” in 1954, the angry, trumpeting giant lizard has remained Nippon’s most famous domestic cinema success and most important cultural export hit to this day – exactly 70 years after its invention. And which would not exist without J. Robert Oppenheimer or “Oppenheimer”. The giant lizard serves as a metaphor for the destructive power of nuclear missiles and has appeared from the depths of the sea and wreaked havoc on the landscape in 33 Japanese and five American films to date. After the atomic bombings of “Little Boy” on Hiroshima and “Fat Man” on Nagasaki, traumatized Japanese society responded nine years later by inventing a monster that actually only wants peace.
Over the years, the fearsome creature has become a reliable, stoically straight-forward-looking (Godzilla has a stiff neck) friend to people in the fight against much worse beasts. His duels against Megagorilla King Kong are particularly popular, in which the super critters throw themselves through infrastructure and redesign habitats through destruction, like rabid landscape planners. Kong comes from an island in the Indian Ocean, but is considered American because they invented him for the cinema in 1933. This makes the duel with Godzilla a proxy battle between two formerly hostile nations. The genesis of Godzilla was influenced not only by the “Little Boys” and “Fat Mans” drops, but also by the Americans’ nuclear tests in Bikini Atoll in 1954, to which the crew of various Japanese fishing boats fell victim – the sailors were contaminated, one died .
It’s amazing that it took an angry pop culture monster to give the Japanese their first Atomic hit in the cinema in 1954, directed by Ishirō Honda. The mutated dinosaur was disturbed in its peace on the seabed by hydrogen bomb tests and now stalks through the terrain as if unleashed.
The Oscar year 2024 combined the contributions of three former world war powers: the USA, Japan and Germany. In addition to “Oppenheimer” and “Godzilla Minus One,” Jonathan Glazer’s film about the Auschwitz camp commandant Rudolf Höß received the Academy Award for “Best International Film”; a work that is directly linked to the American Manhattan Project led by Oppenheimer, whose directive was: Build the bomb before the Nazis have it.
Outside the context of World War II, Japan was also honored by Hayao Miyazaki’s Oscar win for the animated film “The Boy and the Heron.” The German Wim Wenders, who was in the running for “best international film” for Japan, lost to “The Zone of Interest” with “Perfect Days”. The German Sandra Hülser, who plays Rudolf Höß’s wife, Hedwig Höß, in Glazer’s film, was again nominated for her leading role in “Anatomy of a Case” – she lost to Emma Stone (“Poor Things”).