Barbie got nominated for Best Picture but Greta Gerwig was snubbed in the Best Director category. Snubbed! It's an outrage!
Oh, calm down. This whole "snubbed" meme has always been idiotic, and it's maybe even more idiotic this year than before. Greta Gerwig likely missed out for a couple of banal reasons:
- There are ten Best Picture nominees and only five Best Director nominees. Five good directors are always going to get left out.
- Barbie was a traditional summer tentpole movie, a semi-cartoon crowd pleaser. For better or worse, those kinds of movies have never been Oscar bait. The Academy likes to think of itself as more serious.
This is probably all that's going on. Though I admit I think it's odd that Ryan Gosling got a Best Actor nod for what I thought was an OK but not outstanding performance as Ken.
I think I disagree, Kevin. Gosling getting a nod and Margot and Greta being snubbed is ... a little too on-the-nose re: Barbie / our world.
Dyeaaaaaaaaammmmm -- I used "on the nose" in my comment, too, without having read yours!
I mean it is basically the plot of the movie, so very Meta move by the Oscar voters
It's like when Hillary conspired with Russia to lose the election to make Trump look guilty.
Yeah, I had the same exact thought.
I also thought the movie was better social commentary than anything I've seen out of Hollywood in a longass time, and therefore deserving of awards nominations. It wasn't just a "summer tent-pole movie."
This, yeah.
The social commentary was embarrassingly simplistic to your average elementary school student. And from a craft view point, having to bring in a narrator to essentially tell you the point of the movie at the end is also equally embarrassing.
If it followed the plot of the movie where Barbie conquers all in the end and the men are "exposed" as a bunch of simpering idiots and/or Fascist wannabes, Gosling would have got nothing and Margot Robbie would have been nominated.
I would suspect the real reason though is that there might have been stronger competition for slots on the women's lead than men's supporting side this year. And people historically do not get director's nominations for fun movies, as clever and amusing as "Barbie" was. Gerwig would probably agree, having been nominated for Best Director in 2017 for the more "serious" "Lady Bird."
Gosling was nominated for best supporting actor. that requires less than Robbie who would be in the category of best actress.
Also, only a subset of the academy members vote for the Best Director nom - directors. Maybe they know better than the fangirls.
Or, Directors are even more likely to be stuck int9 the auteur theory, and cannot accept that a big budget tent pole movie is well-directed.
Essentially, a tent-pole movie has so many hands steering and adjusting it, so a lot of them have the director's artistic intent diluted. To the extent they show an artistic intent, it is within very tight constraints.
That said, the most remarkable thing about Barbie is, to me, the screenplay, and the fact that they managed to get it made at all. That shows Gerwig's gift for writing, but also the producing tasks she must have gone through to get signoff from Mattel Ann WB. The writing task we reward separately, and the producing takes definitely don't feel like direction.
And she got a nom for her writing. Perfectly reasonable outcome.
And the Academy moved "Barbie" into the "adapted" category. That's inexplicable and probably worth a complaint or two.
It'll likely lose there to "Oppenheimer."
Yeah, it shows her fingerprints *everywhere*.
Well then, how do we explain Greta's nomination for best director from THE DIRECTOR'S GUILD OF AMERICA? I mean, it's DGA members voting for their own 'best of' awards. Almost every year the two sets of nomination overlap. Except this year. Weird, huh?
If by overlap you mean they are the same, you are incorrect. That's only happened five times since 1970. This stuff happens most years. Keep your pants on, Scooter.
Had Gosling not gotten the nod this would not have been an issue and there would have been applause for the Best Picture nod.
But for this movie the male secondary player getting the nod when the female director and lead got nothing, it's just a little too on the nose.
I think he did good, but... I don't know that it was a challenging role compared to steering the visual direction and story direction of the movie.
Gosling didn't get a best actor nomination. He got a supporting actor nomination. America Ferrera also got a supporting actress nomination for Barbie.
I think there is a comic performances very rarely get a best acting nod but they will get supporting nods factor
And Gerwig got a nom for writing, and Robbie a nom for Best Film (as co-producer).
Barbie is the Citizen Kane of Barbie.
There’s also something to be said for the fact that Best Director is probably one of the most consistently sexist of all of the awards. Only seven women have ever received a nomination and only three won. Even if it was not a true snub, there is no category and no potential nominee that screams “Snubbed” more than Gerwig.
Or it screams that the voters thought the five they nominated simply did a better job.
Yes. If you claim she was snubbed, you need to explain why her work is superior to the work of those who were nominated. Name names.
Bullshit, Kevin.
Sorry. Barbie hit the zeitgeist in a way that very few movies do. That makes it much more than just a summer tentpole movie.
The fact that Ryan Gosling got a nomination, while Robbie and Gerwig did not is LITERALLY, the plot of the movie.
Gerwig did an amazing job, as did Robbie, and $1.4B in revenue (so far) speaks to the quality of the film.
You're underestimating what a great piece of film making this was, due to the IP on which it was based.
Avengers Endgame was surely just as ill-treated.
Quibble, but box office speaks to popularity.
Precisely.Rule One in Litrichure and Cinema is, "If something is well-liked, it cannot be good."
The movie was fine but every scene Will Farrell was in was, for me, the movie equivalent of fingernails on a chalkboard. If I was voting on best director Greta wouldn’t have gotten my votes for those scenes alone.
Every year the Oscar nominations are announced on Tuesday and on Wednesday all that the movie writers write about is who didn't get nominated. It's a strange but enduring tradition.
My take on Barbie is than anyone who got a nom from that film should consider themselves lucky. It's a fun-enough movie and a hit with the audience, but by what rights is it Oscar material? It succeeds better than its brain-dead concept (a movie about a doll!), but it's make-believe world of transparent artificiality is all sugar-high, no substance. No, it's not making a feminist statement -- not the one you think, anyway. As a piffle, even an entertaining one, it should be happy with its billion at the box office and move along.
I like Greta Gerwig. She's clearly a talent. But if she got snubbed, then Mel Brooks got snubbed half a dozen times. In the directing category, she remains with one nomination and no wins.
No wins puts her in very good company: Altman, Bergman, Cassavetes, Chaplin, Fellini, Fincher, Godard, Hawks, Hitchcock, Keaton, Kubrick, Kurosawa, Lee, Lubitsch, Lumet, Lynch, Malick, Mann, Renoir, Truffaut, Welles, and others. (Nolan has not won either, but that will change.)
Pretty much sums it up. Plus add in that it was a commercial for Mattel.
Cute movie, but I didn't laugh or cry in tears. Rather unsubtle plat and the roles were simplistic, so hard to judge "acting" ability. Especially for all the Barbies and Kens. Other than Ryan's Ken, everyone else only had 2 or 3 emotional states
Unsubtle plot that didn't move you?
It was supposed to make you laugh.
> No, it's not making a feminist statement
Yeah, the five minutes where they pound you over the head with a feminist statement totally didn't happen.
I think the bigger complaint about the movie from a craft viewpoint was the need to bring in the inventor of barbie as a narrator to explain the movie to the audience as it wrapped up. It's the euivalent to a comedian having to explain why his joke was actually funny after it bombed.
I don’t suppose we could move on to something important like cat blogging?
The thing that always bothers me about these "snubbed" articles is that they rarely mention who should have been kicked out of the nominations. There's only a finite number of slots. You think Gerwig should be nominated, fine, but then give *at least* one name of whom she should have replaced. Likewise, be specific about which actress(es) should be replaced by Robbie.
I would have put Gerwig over both Jonathan Glazer and Scorcese. "Killers of the Flower Moon" isn't even top 10 Scorcese.
And I'd have put Robbie over both Carey Mulligan and Sandra Hüller.
100% agree
Why does Nolan get it for the lesser half of Barbenheimer?
Killers of the Flower Moon isn't even a good movie. It purports to show a native American topic but then gives nothing to them, focusing instead on a detestable bigot taking advantage of them. Just weird directing choices,
The others were meh movies, not notable good for direction.
Thank you
Very right.
Barbie movie was going fine until it jumped off the rails and turned into a dull, ideological lecture about how shitty men are. By the end of the movie, all men are creeps and therefore none are allowed on the Supreme Court. This is supposed to be funny, I guess. To me it was just idiotic.
Imagine a movie where men drag women through the mud to make a point. Such a movie could never be clever or funny. But somehow Barbie is supposed to be.
Maybe you should've paid attention instead of not actually watching the movie.
Because nowhere did it say that.
It was saying 'don't define yourself by your relationship with someone else.'
Billy Wilder on the Oscars, c.1940: "Walter Brennan has three and Garbo has none."
Ah, c'mon... without Ryan Gosling the movie would have been boring. He totally captured the artificiality that the plot rested on.
You could've swapped out any of the Kens. That's the point.
pleasant enough movie, but barbie will have the half-life of a tic tac
The problem with the snub is that too many primarily men who are on the older side try to dismiss it as simply a "summer tentpole movie" as you did here, or it's just "a Barbie movie", similar to how people dismiss super hero movies, comedies, or most sci-fi movies.
When a movie racks up 8 Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, it's extremely rare for the Director not to grab a nomination, especially when they had a hand in the writing.
It also doesn't help that through the entire awards season Gerwig wasn't just only nominated for multiple best Director awards, but often won them, which makes her not grabbing a nod here even more suspect.
Yes there were only five spots, and she should have received one. If you ask me Scorcese is the one that doesn't belong here this year, unfortunately due to his long track record, the man could film a tik tok video of a cat chasing a light and he would still get an Oscar nomination.
Just mentioning a few people who never won the Oscar for best director: Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick…
> a semi-cartoon crowd pleaser
I dunno. When I was watching _Dune_ or _SpiderMan_, I didn't have to sit through a lecture about Feminism.