No spoilers please. I haven't seen it yet.
I haven't been able to talk my wife into watching it with me. I'm about to give up and watch it alone.
Gosling was nominated for Best Supporting Actor. Ferrera was nominated for Best Supporting Actress for her role in the film. The appropriate question is which of the other Best Actress and Best Director nominees should be demoted in Robbie/Gerwig's places, not why Gosling was nominated. Also, industry award shows are unfailingly awful, and the complaints feel to me like complaining about pro wrestling referees. Shrug.
(NB: I have seen zero of the films nominated for anything, so can't say who is more or less deserving.)
This take is a bit unfair. If someone got snubbed in favor if Ryan Gosling, it's other Supporting Actors (e.g., Charles Melton); a vote for him does not come at the expense of his collaborators. There are five women nominated for Best Actress. Margot Robbie was not overlooked due to sexism! A bigger factor is probably the Academy feeling required to nominate Annette Benning and Carey Mulligan no matter what.
Best Director is a category where sexism has been a problem, but there are nine other Best Picture nominees and somebody had to get snubbed. I haven't seen all the nominated movies but it's not obvious to me that any of the Director nominees are less deserving than Gerwig.
Barbie was very good! Much better and smarter than it had any right to be! But people get very hung up on being honored in this one specific way. Sometimes you need to settle for earning a billion dollars.
Charles Melton was fucking robbed. Which is kind of the plot of that movie, too.
I only got around to watching the movie a couple of weeks ago. I had kind of thought, from the limited amount I had read, that the subtext was impressive. I had missed that... no, it's just right there in the text.
My god we're very likely to have a Native American woman win the best actress award and this is what some people are going on about?! Get real.
I don't know the exact mechanics of the nomination voting process, but it's worth noting that every single person who votes for Gosling could also have voted for Robbie and she still might not have been nominated because of the distribution of other votes. (IIRC nominations are decided by the branches, so the Director voters would be different people.)
Oh the Oscars are bullshit? You're just now realizing? So I've clearly never cornered you at a party and explained to you that Denzel won for Training Day because he should have won for Malcolm X but Pacino had to win for Scent of a Woman bc he should have won for Serpico but Jac
Man on Fire was great, but I never saw the Washington movies mentioned.
I thought Barbie was better directed than written. Scene to scene, there was a lot of great stuff, but it really didn't cohere as a whole. (And even in individual scenes, sometimes it didn't cohere.) It compares super favorably to Battleship and Masters of the University, though! (Margot Robbey was really good.)
Anyway, it's not like any of these are timeless classics like Crash or The Greatest Show on Earth.
I think people in this house keep playing the sound track for the last of those.
I think Barbie was well made and well written, but a key thing keeping it from being great was that the main three characters (Barbie, Gloria, Ken) were going on very separate arcs from each other, that also did not particularly resonate with or build on each other, except in that the plot accommodated them all unjarringly.
Agree with 4 and 5. Gerwig got passed over in part because the Director's guild is overwhelmingly male and just isn't going to nominate two women and went with Justine Triet instead, but it's a tough category. But sexism has literally no role in Robbie's snub. I agree it's snub and wish the academy would stop recognizing biopics no one watches, but the discourse is all wrong.
Meanwhile America Ferrera got a nomination for being the worst part of the film, because she has one kinda cringe speech that they want to play at the Oscars. And Gosling is fantastic.
It's a bit odd to nominate Gosling as Best Supporting Actor. He was the male lead in the film he's being nominated for! Surely you don't have to be the main character of the entire film to get a Best Actor/Actress nomination?
It's extremely common to go for supporting if you think you're more likely to win that. There's just not clear rules here, it's just what you choose to campaign for. There's really egregious examples in both directions (Hopkins in Silence of the Lambs, Ali in Green Book).
16: He's got about half as much screen time as Robbie and disappears for the middle third of the movie. Per 17, it's far from the most egregious lead/supporting swap in Oscar history.
Something I was surprised by in the movie is how much the story hinges on addressing Ken's relationship to his masculinity, rather than Barbie's relationship to feminism and women's self-image. (That's in there, for sure, but it seems to me that the climax of the plot is about Ken.)
17: ah, fair enough. Didn't know it was so fluid.
14, 18.2: It's a really interesting movie that subverts a lot of filmmaking conventions in very unusual ways. I suppose Gerwig is largely responsible for that. I don't know if that necessarily makes her a contender for best director of the year but there's certainly a case to be made.
Gosling is fantastic as Ken. It's like the role he was born to play.
That's a very teleological way to view a Canadian.
20: Note that Gerwig did get nominated for screenwriter. (And Robbie in her role as producer got nominated for best picture.)
Gerwig's been consistently directing bangers, and she's young. She's already been nominated for Best Director, and will probably win it at some pioint.
Charles Melton is funny (to me) because it used to be when I told people my last name, they'd say "Any relation to Bill, the guy who played for the White Sox?" Yet no one ever asks "Any relation to the actor who looks like he went through Snapchat's handsomeness filter twice?"
23: Ah, that's good to know. It's kind of weird to see who gets nominated for what when people have multiple roles like that.
I'm always confused about exactly who counts as a "producer" for the purposes of best picture, but by all accounts Robbie played a key role in the development of this film from beginning to end. Cooper and Stone are also nominated as producers, but I think the other 7 nominees don't have actor-producers who were nominated.
I would have voted for her to win for Lady Bird, which is one of my handful of favorite films from this century, though Get Out and Dunkirk were also extremely deserving (of course, none of those won, instead it went to Del Toro for Shape of Water, which is ridiculous but hard to get too mad about since he should have won for Pan's Labyrinth). No nomination for Little Women was also a bit of a snub (of course the film was less successful, but in my mind it's a clearly better film than Barbie, and I think the competition is more difficult this year than it was for Little Women).
Partially it's because the role of producer is itself so fluid -- everything from "I am the person who had a vision for this movie from the moment I read the novel on which it was based" to "I am the GM of this picture and arranged the production concerns" to "I am a money guy who brought in a bunch of European investors looking for a tax write-off" to "I am a star of this movie and am being given this title as a courtesy" to "I am a star's side-piece and was given this title as a courtesy to let me hang around on set". Robbie and her husband do a lot of work that falls between the first three, I think; their production company earned a nod for Promising Young Woman, which Robbie didn't appear in.
29: Right, I know producer can mean anything, but as far as I can tell not all credited producers are nominated, instead you have to be some kind of "real" producer.
Vulture had a piece saying that Gerwig not getting a director nomination was evidence that Hollywood was still biased against female directors which would be more convincing if this was not the first movie Gerwig directed for which she was not nominated for best director! She even won on one of those two prior nominations! I doubt there's a single male director with a record that good! It also claimed, absurdly to me, that a man who directed the same film would have been nominated, when I think there would actually have been considerable backlash (perhaps reasonably!) to a man telling the same story.
Vulture had a piece saying that Gerwig not getting a director nomination was evidence that Hollywood was still biased against female directors which would be more convincing if this was not the first movie Gerwig directed for which she was not nominated for best director! She even won on one of those two prior nominations! I doubt there's a single male director with a record that good! It also claimed, absurdly to me, that a man who directed the same film would have been nominated, when I think there would actually have been considerable backlash (perhaps reasonably!) to a man telling the same story.
Vulture had a piece saying that Gerwig not getting a director nomination was evidence that Hollywood was still biased against female directors which would be more convincing if this was not the first movie Gerwig directed for which she was not nominated for best director! She even won on one of those two prior nominations! I doubt there's a single male director with a record that good! It also claimed, absurdly to me, that a man who directed the same film would have been nominated, when I think there would actually have been considerable backlash (perhaps reasonably!) to a man telling the same story.
I don't think that's true? She was nominated and did not win for Lady Bird. She was not nominated for Little Women, nor for her super-indie debut film.
(Which is not to say she hasn't received high acclaim. She has received a screenplay nomination for all three of her mainstream studio films and they have all been highly nominated in a variety of categories. She even received a DGA nomination for Barbie, in favor of Justine Triet (who possibly wasn't eligible).)
I mean of course it depends on how highly you rate Gerwig. Personally I think she's the best director working in Hollywood right now, so zero wins and only one nomination in three films in my book means she's underrated by the director's in the academy. Yes there's more best picture nominees than director nominees, but to go 3/3 for best picture nominations and only 1/3 for best director looks like she's underrated by the Director's relative to her stature among the rest of the voters.
Here's Ebert's prediction before the nominations came out:
"But it'll be close, and there's unfortunately a real chance that we'll get an all-male lineup if the voters tacitly view their ballots as having only one slot for a woman (meaning Gerwig and Triet could split the vote)."
He ended up predicting Gerwig would make it and Triet wouldn't, which turned out to be backwards, but the broader point that a lot of director's only have one ballot slot for women seems to largely hold up. (Two women were nominated in the covid delayed Oscars, but that was a weird year, and it's literally only happened once.)
Ebert has sat immobile, His body slowly crumbling, within the Golden Throne of RogerEbert.com for over 10,000 standard years. Although once a living man, His shattered, decaying body can no longer support life, and it is kept intact only by the cybernetic mechanisms of the Golden Throne and a potent mind itself sustained by the daily sacrifice of thousands of lives.
There's a ton of great directors, living and dead, who never won Oscars. It took Martin Scorsese 30 years and six nominations to win. Christopher Nolan (who I don't love, but you can't say he's under-appreciated) is only on his second nomination.
I still have no idea what happened in Tenet, but it wasn't bad.
41: If anyone's arguing that it's sexist Gerwig hasn't *won* yet, yeah that's a dumb argument. As I said, I personally would have voted for Lady Bird, but there's a dozens of things I would have voted for that didn't win (with George Miller's Mad Max:Fury Road over fucking Inarritu for the second year in a row being at the top of the list). But Gerwig getting passed over for nominations *twice in a row* with one being the biggest film phenomenon of the year, that's a snub and in context it seems to me that sexism played a role here (spefically voters having a quota where they will only vote for one woman).
The best counterargument, which I think has some merit, is that the true bias in the voters for Best Director is in favor of foreign filmmakers over Americans.
I used to be mad that Annie Hall beat Star Wars.
Now you get to be mad about it again, but for different reasons!
Ah yeah--I had her record a bit wrong. But yes 3/3 for best writer nominations, 1/3 for best director still seems pretty good even without a win. Some correct contrarianism along these lines here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_awards_and_nominations_rec
Correct link--not my day apparently.
https://slate.com/culture/2024/01/barbie-oscar-nominations-2024-hillary-clinton-ryan-gosling-statement.html?via=rss
I have to say, even I am not so cynical that I could have predicted that these tweets would be taken seriously enough that Hillary Clinton herself would weigh in. Before that, I thought, People are being quite weird about this, aren't they? After, I was convinced I was witnessing an episode of collective cultural psychosis. Hillary Clinton! Tweeted to say "Greta and Margot" were "more than Kenough" despite not getting Oscar nominations!
As my backlash to the backlash to the backlash - why shouldn't Hillary Clinton weigh in on some trivial but galvanizing matter of pop culture? She hasn't been a candidate for any public office for 7 years, or held a public office for (in 6 days exactly) 10 years. Let her be frivolous.
Maybe we don't need Clinton or Gosling to weigh in but do we need someone to weigh in on Clinton and Gosling weighing in? Where does the weighing in stop? Is there an optimal amount of weighing in? Will there be a national conversation on the weighing in of opinions about opinions?
Who will weigh in on the weighers-in?
But sexism has literally no role in Robbie's snub.
I agree with 10, but think it's fair to point out that sexist people would want to ignore a movie about Barbie specifically.
Anyone who sees this as a repeat of the 2016 election should Pokémon Go and take a long, hard look at themselves.
WTF is "Pokémon" doing in this sentence?
It wasn't ignored! It got 8 nominations!
Top Gun: Maverick only got 6 last year.
52: https://tenor.com/view/pokemon-go-to-the-polls-hillary-clinton-vote-election-day-gif-12834660
Now that cock fighting is illegal and stigmatized, Pokémon Go is all we have.
why shouldn't Hillary Clinton weigh in on some trivial but galvanizing matter of pop culture?
Same reason Mahmoud Ahmadinejad shouldn't tweet about college football: it's just too weird.
55: No no, there's a knockoff Pokemon-with-guns game now.
I've just seen a couple of jokes about that, but not the game.
8 is correct. AIHMHB, LG is considered local here -- I've met her through mutual friends, and been a fan since I saw her on stage 13 or 14 years ago -- and her nomination is quite a sensation. The day after the Globes my feed had a picture of her with Leo captioned "Lily with Some Guy." Her Globe win was front page above the fold in the local paper, and you had to look pages in to find out if anyone else won anything.
The feature here from several years ago is worth reading: https://issuu.com/missoulanews/docs/missoulaindependenti04012617 You get a good idea what kind of person she is, and what it's taken for her to get where she is.
There are people who think her best film of 2023 was *Fancy Dance.* I was going to go see it in a theater, but life intervened, and now I'll have to wait.
It's at best a coin flip for Gladstone to win, most things I've seen have Emma Stone as the favorite (but at any rate it's a two-woman race, no one else has any chance).
Huh, I was not expecting the answer to "how'd she get the name Gladstone?" to be "she's cousins with the prime minister."
Aw, she got her start at Missoula Children's Theater! That's adorable! I have many friends who have worked there, most of them for a year or two, but one for decades.
And French Canadian.
I saw something on FB the other day that they're estimating that the last person eligible for Blackfeet citizenship will be born between 2040 and 2050. Blood quantum citizenship thresholds are a ticking timebomb, but the people with the power to make the change have short term incentives not to do so. Gladstone has embraced and been embraced by her Blackfeet community: I wonder if the example of the most famous person on earth associated with the Blackfeet Nation being ineligible to vote will have an impact in the decades to come.
The knock on effects of her winning run from predictable -- new opportunities for her and for the filmmakers who've featured her in the past -- outwards. The significance for Ms. Stone, who already has an Oscar, or for Ms. Robbie, had she been nominated again, are just in a different category. Oscar voters famously look at factors beyond the specific performance in front of them; we'll see whether and how this affects them.
"I saw something on FB the other day that they're estimating that the last person eligible for Blackfeet citizenship will be born between 2040 and 2050. Blood quantum citizenship thresholds are a ticking timebomb, "
Quick summary of why? Presumably blood purity laws and the curse of miscegenation? (No there is no less creepy way to say that)
They were too far north to learn by our example.
Blackfoot land is actually around the same latitude as the Habsburg Empire (in whose former territory I am at present).
They neglected also to learn from our achievements in oceanic transport.
You're thinking of the Webbedfeet Nation.
For reasons of portraiture convention our jaws are better remembered, but our line is in fact webbedfeet too.
65 Yes, basically young people are having children with other young people who are either members of other Native tribes, or of non-Native heritage. Citizenship in many Native nations -- at least one Cherokee nation is a distinct exception -- depends of on percentage 'blood' from the specific nations. These were tracked carefully by the federal government for a long time -- maybe they still are, in addition to being tracked by the Native governments.
I am also in former Habsburg territory right now. I'm in Ischgl -- where are you?
Looks like there's also a lot of tribes (but not Blackfeet) where the "blood quantum" requirements aren't tribe-specific, so marrying a member of another tribe wouldn't be a problem. (Eg they might require being at least a quarter Native American and also having an ancestor who is a member of this tribe.)
Unsurprisingly blood quantum rules were originally imposed by the federal government.
Also unsurprisingly two of the big drivers of these rules surviving are casino income and a desire to exclude black people from tribal membership.
Oh, and here's an interesting wrinkle that seems a lot more sensible:
"Other tribes require a minimum blood degree only for tribal members born "off" (outside) the nominal reservation. This is a concept comparable to a combination of the legal principles of Jus soli and Jus sanguinis in the nationality laws of modern sovereign states."
I don't think anyone in my clan would actually qualify for membership if we imposed that rule. Fortunately the only thing that membership affects is the family ghost.
For the record, I have now seen the Barbie Movie and pronounce it ... okay. No performance worth a nomination, and I don't think Gerwig's direction stood out either. (Though I'm a little unclear about exactly what separates the concept of Best Director from Best Movie.)
It had a lot of the same virtues as the Lego Movie and was maybe 75 percent as good -- which, sure, is still pretty good.
I found the Lego Movie to be annoying.
77
(Though I'm a little unclear about exactly what separates the concept of Best Director from Best Movie.)
I'm not a big film buff and it's a bit more complicated in this case because Gerwig was the director and co-writer, but when I think about what stands out in the Barbie movie, directorial choices are exactly what comes to mind. Two examples.
1. The whole "real people but plastic world" design of Barbieland. Directors would make the choice about when to use practical effects vs. CGI, right? CGI is a lot more common these days but Gerwig went in the other direction. It seemed very unique, having human actors in a world that was mostly plastic around them.
2. All the unreal stuff in the real world. People on Venice beach and in the high school treated Barbie and Ken basically like you'd expect, sure, but in the Mattel headquarters they had cubicles with no doors, they had executives chasing Barbie themselves and doing the Scooby Do chase thing. Another director might have felt they had to be "realistic" because it was the "real" world.
The main difference between Best Director and Best Picture is that nominations for the former is only voted for by directors and nominations for the latter are based on votes from the whole academy. (Conversely, winners for the former are voted on by everyone based on first-past-the-post, while winners for the latter are voted on by everyone but with instant runoff.) I suspect that's much more important than any questions around "what part of the film is due to the director?"
78: Everything is Awesome! Including the Lego Movie
79: Point one: Yeah, see, to my mind, the Lego Movie was better on the combination of Real World vs. Fantasy and on filming techniques. The Lego stop motion was a hoot! And as clever as it was, I don't think Lego should have been nominated for Best Picture or Director.
Point two: I think it would have been a better choice to make the real world more real -- or more evil and powerful, rather than merely incompetent. Will Ferrell in Lego vs. Will Ferrell in Barbie really sums up why Lego was the better movie. Barbie's Ferrell was pointless - or even arguably undercut Gerwig's point about the real world.
80: These conversations often fail to disambiguate what should happen and what, as a practical matter in the real world, we should expect to happen. I'm sure you're right about how the Academy works, but the interesting discussion to me is: How would it work if people were rewarded appropriately. (And, of course, there's no answer for that. It's all de gustibus all the way down. But that's still the question that interests me.)
I wonder if I'm alone in thinking that the largely sympathetic portrayal of Ken unintentionally promotes inappropriate sympathy for incels.
I think it would have been a better choice to make the real world more real -- or more evil and powerful, rather than merely incompetent. Will Ferrell in Lego vs. Will Ferrell in Barbie really sums up why Lego was the better movie. Barbie's Ferrell was pointless - or even arguably undercut Gerwig's point about the real world.
That's just the thing, though. Gerwig had the opportunity to make either the Mattel executives or the Kens the bad guys, which would have been the conventional cinematic move. Instead she very pointedly declined to have any bad guys; the Kens are portrayed sympathetically, and the Mattel guys are used for slapstick comic relief. Obviously not everyone liked that choice but I found it fascinating.
Another conventional move she pointedly avoided would have been to make the movie about either Barbie's Journey or the Revolt of the Kens (maybe saving the other one for the sequel). Instead she combined the two into one overall story that maybe doesn't totally make sense but is, again, fascinating as a choice.
83: But not terribly surprising if you look at the way she wrote and directed Amy March. A deeply sympathetic portrayal of one of the more hated characters in literature.
I think the main mark of a Gerwig film is just the deep love she shows for her supporting and minor characters.
83-84. Yeah, I think that's well-observed and captures my preference, in this case, for the "conventional cinematic move."
82: I wouldn't go that far, but the decision to have the Barbies' counterrevolution depend on them turning men against each other by flirting and encouraging their jealousy was a choice that I don't think Gerwig-as-screenwriter gave the consideration she should have.
82: I have seen that critique, I think in several places, but the one person I definitely remember making it, is Jeet Heer.
The LEGO bad guy worked because the plot turns out to be mostly the little kid's understanding of the grown-up world and how things work based on movies. (The piece of resistance!*) Barbie's world would have made more sense if that was the story, but it winds up being kind of jumbled and preachy, even as it's a lot of fun. Mostly I just felt gaslighted about the Barbie-was-always-a-feminist-toy line but enjoyed the pink frivolity of it all.
*The Calabat was Emmett for Halloween when he was two. We had a removable piece of resistance attached with Velcro.
Maybe? But in universe it's an 8yo, not a middle-aged America Ferrara.
I kind of burned out on Will Ferrell too.
Hoping this doesn't come off as cantankerous, basically picking up on points teo and Cyrus mentioned about Barbie: Big-budget films from Hollywood have been blighted by cgi and superhero idiocy, also mostly only very simple structure. Gerwig managed to make a movie that was subtle, intelligent, fun and idiosyncratically beautiful, but also politically relevant-- it's not a substack column about toys and evolving feminism.
I very much liked the series of actual historical action figures and their packaging for a bridge between the imagined world and the real one. Reminded me of Spike Lee's montage in Bamboozled. Gerwig supposedly had a letterboxd account, the movies that account included as supposed influences are all beautiful and interesting. I'm planning to rewatch Splash, and will try Puberty Blues. https://www.vulture.com/2022/05/margot-robbie-letterboxd-account-found-deleted.html
95.2: The link says that's alleged to be Robbie's account, not Gerwig's.
I meant the link as in the article, but in this case even the URL.
I'm enjoying trying to guess what does or does not happen in the movie based on descriptions of choices Gerwig did not make. I probably should just watch it.