Barbie , the Oscars and Greta Gerwig’s “Snub”

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.

Originally published at https://raritania.blogspot.com.