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Oppenheimer won best picture and six other prizes at the 96th Academy Awards, delivering Christopher Nolan his first Oscar for best director and Cillian Murphy the top award for actor.

Nolan had been nominated five times for writing or directing but had never won. Emma Thomas, Nolan’s wife and the film’s producer, accepted the best picture prize.

“I could deny it but I have been dreaming of this for so long,” Thomas said in her acceptance speech. “But it seems so unlikely that it would ever actually happen.”

Emma Stone won the best actress award for her role as Bella Baxter in Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos’s adaptation of the story of a dead girl brought back to life by a mad scientist played by Willem Dafoe. The film won four awards.

Nolan’s three-hour biopic of J Robert Oppenheimer, the atomic bomb inventor, was a critical and commercial success, taking in close to $1bn at the box office.

Nolan has built a dedicated fan base with films including his Batman trilogy and Inception, but Oppenheimer’s fortunes were boosted by the “Barbenheimer” rivalry. Barbie and Oppenheimer were released on the same weekend in July, leading hundreds of thousands of film-goers to buy tickets to see both.

Many fans felt Barbie, directed by Greta Gerwig and starring Margot Robbie, was snubbed by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences after neither of the women received nominations. The $1.4bn-grossing film won only one award, for best song, which went to Billie Eilish and her brother, Finneas O’Connell, for “What Was I Made For?”.

The awards ceremony at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood drew about 1,000 protesters opposed to Israel’s assault on Gaza, who gathered outside the venue. But the awards show was relatively free of politics. Jonathan Glazer, director of The Zone of Interest, said those killed in Israel on October 7 and in Gaza were victims of “dehumanisation” as he collected the award for best international film.

The annual In Memoriam segment led with a clip of Alexei Navalny, the Russian activist who died in a prison camp last month. A documentary about Navalny won an Oscar last year.

This year the best documentary award went to 20 Days in Mariupol, about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“This is the first Oscar in Ukrainian history, and I’m honoured,” said Mstyslav Chernov, the film’s director. “Probably I will be the first director on this stage to say I wish I had never made this film, I wish to be able to exchange this [for] Russia never attacking Ukraine.”

After several years in which the Oscars drew criticism for celebrating smaller films, this year featured a pair of blockbusters and work by big-name directors. Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon received multiple nominations, including best picture, but came up empty.

This year’s awards featured films released during a tough year for Hollywood, which was riven by months of strikes that will lead to a smaller slate of films this year.

Nonetheless, it was “a great and eclectic year for the movies,” director Steven Spielberg said at the awards ceremony.