The Oscars Are Confused About

“Barbie”
Source: newyorker.com

The snubbing the film’s central voices—Greta Gerwig and Margot

Robbie—the Academy continues its tense relationship with
blockbusters.

By Michael Schulman
January 23, 2024
Behind the scenes of Greta Gerwig’s film “Barbie.”Photograph courtesy Warner Bros.
It was the biggest hit of the summer. Then it was the biggest hit of
the year. It was a blockbuster so gigantic—crowd-pleasing, artful, a
triumph for its young director—that it changed what the movie
business thought it knew about making money. But it was more than a
movie: it was a pop-cultural phenomenon, the mother of a million
marketing tie-ins, and its runaway success seemed to say something
about the troubled America from which it sprang. When Oscar season
came, it was nominated for Best Picture—but its director was
snubbed. The movie was “Jaws,” from 1975. You can still watch the
pipsqueak Steven Spielberg ogling the television on the morning of
the nominations and gawking in disbelief as his presumed Best
Director spot goes to Federico Fellini, for “Amarcord.” “I didn’t get
it!” he cries, his face pressed into his fists.

Granted, the competition was stiff. “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s
Nest” was also a box-office hit (though nowhere near “Jaws”) and had
all the hallmarks of New Hollywood prestige, including an auteur
director (Miloš Forman), a rambunctious lead performance (Jack
Nicholson), and an anti-authoritarian spirit that refracted the
Watergate era. Both were up against such stone-cold classics as “Dog
Day Afternoon,” “Nashville,” and “Barry Lyndon.” On Oscar night,
“Cuckoo’s Nest” made a clean sweep of the major categories. “Jaws”
won three of its four nominations, for its score, its editing, and its
sound. But its trio of lead actors—Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss,
and Robert Shaw—whose performances are now burnished in the
popular imagination, were, like Spielberg, not nominated. The Oscars
had all but whiffed on the biggest movie of the year. Now a fibreglass
shark hangs in the Academy Museum, as if to apologize for the
oversight.

On Tuesday morning, a new round of Oscar nominations came out,

with decidedly mixed results for the biggest movie of last year,
“Barbie.” It got eight nominations—twice as many as “Jaws”—
including for Best Picture. Two of its actors were nominated in
supporting categories: Ryan Gosling, as Ken, and, in a surprise,
America Ferrera, as Gloria, a frustrated working mom who delivers a
searing monologue about the contradictions of modern womanhood.
Two of its songs, “I’m Just Ken” and “What Was I Made For?,” made
the Best Original Song list, and it was honored for its costume and
production design, and for its screenplay, by Greta Gerwig and Noah
Baumbach. But the absences are glaring. Gerwig, like Spielberg, was
left off the directing list, and the film’s title star, Margot Robbie,
wasn’t nominated for Best Actress.

Before the nominations, there were whispers that snobbery would

derail the film’s Oscar hopes, but the results show some puzzlement
on the part of Academy voters. “Barbie” was far from ignored, but
overlooking the two women who were its driving creative forces is a
curious way to match nominations to achievement. The movie’s
unlikely twin, “Oppenheimer,” had no such gaps: it got thirteen
nominations, the most of any film, and is in prime position to win
many of them, including Best Picture, Best Director (Christopher
Nolan), and Best Actor (Cillian Murphy). Like “Cuckoo’s Nest,”
“Oppenheimer” is both a critical darling and a box-office smash
—“Barbie” is, too, but “Oppenheim