Will Barbie Win Best Picture at this Year's Oscars?

It may seem premature to ask the question of this piece's title. After all, the year still has two months to go--with those last two months tending to be particularly rich in the sorts of critical darlings that usually take home little statuettes, the actual quality of which we can only speculate about as yet.

However, there is a politics to the Academy Awards that, just as it makes clear that some of those upcoming films will have their claims and their backers (Bradley Cooper's Maestro, Ava Duvernay's Origin, Blitz Bazawule's The Color Purple, and conventionally films like Ridley Scott's Napoleon, George Clooney's The Boys in the Boat and Michael Mann's Ferrari), allows us to slight such matters as actual "quality." And considering just a few of the more obvious aspects of that politics makes it easy to picture things working out this way.

There is, especially in this era of sinking public interest in the Oscars (such that probably the only thing anyone remembers from any recent ceremony is the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air slapping Cheap Pete live before a global audience), a desire to appeal to a more general audience reflected in their paying more attention to widely seen movies.

This year, none has been more widely seen, or likely to be more widely seen, than Barbie, still the #1 hit of the year.

Moreover, unlike other widely watched movies that get nominated for Best Picture even though everyone knows they are not going to win in their category (did anyone seriously expect Top Gun 2 or Avatar 2 to take home the prize last year?), Barbie seems to have been a genuine, not-graded-on-a-curve-as-just-pretty-good-by-blockbuster standards, unqualified critical darling, helmed by a critics' darling of a director with a very loud cheering section of her own who has already been nominated for a Best Director and two Best Screenplay Oscars and not got any of them. This will add to the film's advantages as a box office success enjoying the benefit of critical opinion and the backing of a formidable lobby insistent that it is her "turn" after the disappointments of 2018 and 2020 (and in light of the foregoing, what better time than this for it?).

And of course, there is the more conventionally political aspect of the film. Much as we hear about Hollywood's supposed liberalism, the fact remains that its liberalism has generally been confined to culture war/status politics issues, and much less in evidence on anything else, with the Academy no exception. Thus Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer, with its themes of the politics of Big Science, war, the nuclear age and McCarthyism a movie that a genuinely left observer could find compelling if treated the right way (indeed, David Walsh, who seems to have never had a good word for Nolan for two decades, gave this film a strongly positive review), is the kind of thing that these days would make the Academy squeamish indeed. By contrast a movie about the gender politics of plastic toys is more their speed.

That said, not everyone will be happy with the choice. Some will be very unhappy indeed--and very vocal about their unhappiness, in those ways that led to the kind of intriguing of which Andrea Riseborough's Oscar nomination became a target last year, against which a giant major studio production like Barbie will be absolutely proof, but to which other films might be vulnerable. Still, for the time being Barbie is the movie that, whether or not one thinks it most deserving, seems to me most likely to take Best Picture next year, with very little chance of that changing in the months between now and the ceremony.