Oppenheimer won Best Picture at the recently concluded 96th Academy Awards this Sunday, NBC reported.

Christopher Nolan's epic film on the father of the atomic bomb dominated the awards as it won top prizes for not just best picture but also best director for Nolan, best actor for Cillian Murphy and best supporting actor for Robert Downey Jr. — all three first-time winners. In Murphy's case, this was also his first nomination.

Oppenheimer cements Christopher Nolan's Hollywood legacy

The film also earned other accolades from the Academy including best original score, best cinematography and best film editing.

The movie was a critical and box office success and was this year's Oscars front-runner with 13 nominations. It also won best picture from the Golden Globes as well as the Producers Guild of America.

Oppenheimer's win firmly secures Nolan's legacy as one of the best filmmakers in modern Hollywood history. For cinephiles and even casual movie fans, he was already a big name with his Dark Knight trilogy that was largely credited for making Hollywood — and the rest of the world — take comic book heroes seriously. His mind-bending movies such as 2010's Inception and 2014's Interstellar are mainstays on social media when it comes to favorite “complicated” movies.

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Nolan's 2023 film bested several other in the field such as Greta Gerwig's billion-dollar blockbuster hit Barbie, which was also the other half of the Barbenheimer phenomenon. Both movies are credited to have revitalized the cinema business in the era of streaming since they earned a combined $2.4 billion globally with Oppenheimer contributing $957 million.

Oppenheimer is also the most commercially successful Oscar best picture winner since The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King by Peter Jackson in 2003. In the last few years, the academy has voted film for best picture that are relative on the lower end of the budget scale such as CODA in 2021, Nomadland in 2020 and Spotlight in 2015.

Nolan's film had the ensemble cast which included Emily Blunt (who also received her first Oscar nomination for this film), Florence Pugh, Matt Damon, Josh Hartnett, Casey Affleck, Benny Safdie, Jason Clarke, Rami Malek and Kennth Branagh. The movie's cast earned the Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture honor at the SAG Awards.

See the complete list of the 2024 Oscar nominees and winners here.