There’s a lot at work around the news of the Academy nominations for the 2024 ceremony, so I thought I’d take a moment to look at them.
But first: Let’s acknowledge that as an AMAB who has spent around 40 years of his life presenting as a cisgendered white dude, I’m not exactly the person who needs to be listened to. But I’m allowed to say things, and therefore I will.
Like I say, it’s a complicated story — as simple as it is to look at the themes of Barbie (2023) and say, “Well, this is the perfect illustration of everything the movie was trying to say.” Any time you’re dealing with the Oscars and AMPAS, making heads or tails of what’s really going on is dicey at best. So instead of trying to weave through and create a coherent analysis that is absolutely, positively, EXACTLY WHAT’S GOING ON (except it’s not), I thought I’d take a moment and just acknowledge some individual truths in no particular order.
(And if you’d like to know more about how AMPAS has worked in the past, how it has changed, and some of its best and worst moments, I highly recommend Michael Schulman’s Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears1.)
- It’s worth acknowledging that, when you have a critically-praised box office success that uses the lore of Barbie to make the point that the patriarchy continues in subtle and insidious ways, nominating Ken and not Barbie or the female director who made the movie happen is at least a very bad look.
- The Oscars have a long history of being sexist, racist, and any other kind of -ist you can think of. Acting like the problem is in the long, forgotten past seems less naive and more like willful ignorance.
- America Ferrera was nominated for Best Supporting Actress for her role in Barbie, and it’s very well-deserved.
- One of the nominees for Best Actress is Lily Gladstone who, at this point, seems to be in a very good position to become the first actress of indigenous American descent to ever win the award. (That could change, as some points coming up later in this list suggest.)
- Margot Robbie is a phenomenal actress who is the beating heart of Barbie which was, absolutely, one of my favorite movies of the year.
- Greta Gerwig is a phenomenal director who was the driving force behind Barbie which was, absolutely, one of my favorite movies of the year.
- Speaking of other nominations, Barbie picked up nominations for Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, Original Song (albeit for “I’m Just Ken” — a great song, but there’s that bad look again), Costume Design, and Production Design, all of which are also richly-deserved.
- Best Actress is packed with excellent choices.
- There’s a phenomenon in awards — all awards — of inevitability fatigue. Basically, the more inevitable an award seems to be and the more an award is discussed as inevitable, the more likely voters are to wind up trying to find an alternative because they’re just sick and tired of hearing how inevitable it all is.
- There’s also a curious phenomenon where an award seems so locked in, that voters will vote for a different recipient simply to say that they did. This is largely credited for one of the greatest upsets in Oscar history — 1998’s Best Picture for Shakespeare in Love when the favored film all along had been Saving Private Ryan. One member of the creative team reported that he heard so many times, “I voted for your movie. Too bad it won’t win — it’s Saving Private Ryan‘s year,” that he started to wonder if anybody had actually voted for Ryan.
- It’s part of the underlying misogyny of our culture that people often dismiss things that girls and women love as being worthless. Witness Oliver Stone’s inflammatory comments about Ryan Gosling “wasting his time” by appearing in Barbie that the director has since retracted, saying that he never should have criticized the movie without seeing it first, and that he has since seen the movie and loves it.
- Hollywood loves pop culture only slightly less than it hates giving awards to anything based on pop culture.
- Harvey Weinstein is a dickhead and among the absolute least of his offenses is that he is almost solely responsible for turning Oscar season from a sporting game into a street fight — an attitude that continues to the present day. And when people have talked so much about how you’re the favorite to win the fight, every publicity agent at every other company suddenly thinks your throat would look a lot better if it were cut.
- When was the last time you scream-sang along with songs from The Indigo Girls’ “Rite of Passage?” It’s probably not recent enough. You should take care of that.
- Bookshop.org affiliate link, created 1/25/2024 ↩︎