The Oscar nominations are out.
The big surprise is that Barbie, while having eight nominations including Best Picture, two acting nominations and a nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay (and did I mention Best Picture?), has not got nominations in the Best Actress category--or of more importance, Best Director.
Deserving or not (since when have the Oscars had anything to do with being deserving?) I had thought Gerwig a lock for the prize this year simply because of the politics that surround the ceremony ("I didn't get one last time so it's my turn," etc.), and because I thought the movie similarly a lock for Best Picture, which tends to pretty strongly correlate with Best Director honors.
Certainly it is rare for a Best Picture winner to not even get nominated in this area--and my first thought was that maybe its chances at Best Picture have fallen to nil. Still, it is worth remembering that the correlation is far from perfect--that as recently as the 2022 ceremony CODA won Best Picture without a Best Director nomination, while in just the 2010s fellow Best Picture winners Green Book (2018) and Argo (2012) also lacked Best Picture nominations, three in scarcely a decade.
And one can in fact look to the same politics that make Barbie seem like the obvious winner as explaining why it did not get a Best Director nomination. If Barbie has a very loud cheering section, there are always lots of other egos, interests, groups, to be placated, producing a pressure to distribute the honors so as to make sure that, even if there is no pleasing everybody, the Academy can make sure no one who matters ends up too unsatisfied, and indeed one can make a case that the Academy has in fact been very careful about that this year (perhaps encouraged by the unpleasantness of the Andrea Riseborough affair last year).
The result is that I can picture Barbie being given Best Picture as a smaller film (perhaps, for example, Justine Triet's Anatomy of a Fall) is honored with the Best Director award, and Greta Gerwig is compensated indirectly (if Barbie gets the Best Picture honor after all), and/or directly for her next film a couple of years down the road (maybe even for a film which her own sympathizers will regard as less deserving, even as they think, "At least they're making up for the last time").
Still, I am less persuaded than before that Barbie will get the Best Picture honor, and not only because it failed to land the Best Director nomination. As it happens, Oppenheimer, which came close to sweeping the Golden Globes the way Barbie's fans hope the movie will sweep Oscar night looks to have the momentum here, so much so as to seem a very strong candidate for that biggest prize announced only at the end of the ceremony.
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6 comments:
I see lots of tweets and lots of things in the media about this, and it's driving me crazy.
I very much disliked Barbie.
Hello again!
As always, you are welcome--indeed, invited--to expand on that thought.
Perhaps it's because I have never liked cringe comedy, especially one with a moral/ political message, but I don't understand what the big deal with Barbie is. I don't understand why people love it so much, and think so highly of it that they think it's a terrible thing Greta Gerwig wasn't nominated for Best Director.
Something like Anatomy of a Fall has a much more interesting female character, and it explores gender in a much more interesting way.
(I also disliked Oppenheimer and wasn't crazy about Killers of the Flower Moon, so maybe I'm just out of touch).
I don't think you're out of touch. I think it's that--beyond all the politics I have been talking about here in the posts about this, which I think all can agree have nothing to do with cinematic quality as such, but excite very strong passions in some groups in some circumstances--wildly disproportionate reaction is the life's blood of the media universe we live in, and especially social media. People freak out about something for three hours, in a week have lost all interest, and probably in a month very few remember the thing they got so riled up about at all, and that's always a part of this kind of thing.
In fact, replying now I'm already finding myself mentally beginning to draft a post about all that.
Thanks for writing!
Yeah, I do find the obsession with identity rather insane. Every single year, I hear the same things about the Oscars (though I have now stopped paying attention to these awards).
Looking forward to reading your post about this subject.
Thank you! (And while all this does have a sociological interest, paying all this as little mind as possible is indeed best.)
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