Filmography: Memento (2000); Insomnia (2002); Batman Begins (2005); The Prestige (2006); The Dark Knight (2008); Inception (2010); The Dark Knight Rises (2012) Undoubtedly many would rank Christopher Nolan at the top of this list, and while he doesn't get the top spot here, it is understandable why many would wish to see him ranked first. Nolan is an immensely talented director who has inconceivably managed to fuse populist elements of summer blockbusters with cerebral subject matter such as existentialism, nihilism, and the fractured and compartmental nature of the self. How he has managed to do this is hard to say, but with a dash of Kubrick, and pinch of Bergman, and a good dose of Spielberg, Nolan's outlook on film is a winning combination. For cineastes, Nolan first came to the forefront with his immaculately structured, film-noir-esque Memento. The story of a man incapable of forming new memories trying to avenge the death of his wife is a fascinating puzzle piece of a motion picture that many still feel is Nolan's crowning achievement. The more casual filmgoer will most likely know Nolan for his reimagining of Batman in his Dark Knight trilogy, of which the middle film, The Dark Knight, was one of the few cinematic cultural phenomena of the new millennium. The fact that Nolan could get so many people intrigued by a character as utterly nihilistic as Heath Ledger's The Joker is still a feat that is hard to comprehend. Herein lies Nolan's primary talent though, a man clearly interested in the inner and outer workings of the universe, but still enough of a member of popular culture to be able to create works of art that almost everyone can enjoy, regardless of where on the spectrum of cinematic fandom they belong.
A film fanatic at a very young age, starting with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle movies and gradually moving up to more sophisticated fare, at around the age of ten he became inexplicably obsessed with all things Oscar. With the incredibly trivial power of being able to chronologically name every Best Picture winner from memory, his lifelong goal is to see every Oscar nominated film, in every major category, in the history of the Academy Awards.
