A pink comedy, Barbie’s Oscars story is a typical Hollywood ending

Even before Barbie became a cultural and box office phenomenon in mid-2023, there was already Oscars expectation for the woman whose creative vision would pull it all together: Greta Gerwig.

The now 40-year-old director had a sterling track record. Her first two solo-directed films, Lady Bird and Little Women, were both nominated for best picture Oscars. With Lady Bird, she became only the fifth woman in the history of the then nine-decades old awards to be nominated in best director.

As a director – and before that as a screenwriter (Frances Ha) and actor (20th Century Women) – Gerwig was someone you could entrust to tell women’s stories with care and nuance.

If anyone was going to be able to elevate a pink-frosted movie about a girls’ toy to the Oscars stage, it was going to be Gerwig.

Then Barbie came out and in between the feverish fandom and the critical acclaim, it was clear the frothy comedy with a heart and a brain was going to be a big deal come awards season.

Gerwig’s nomination for a directing Oscar was looking promising. Barbie was a gargantuan feat, from its flawless and vibrant production design and masterfully choreographed dance sequences to its emotional beats, played with a subtlety that was surprising for a riotous comedy.

But then, in the past few weeks, for those of us who are nerdy enough to obsess over awards prognosticators and precursors such as the BAFTAs and Golden Globes, whiffed that Barbie and Gerwig was losing momentum.

The winds had shifted and the director everyone was talking about was French filmmaker Justine Triet and her film, Anatomy of a Fall, a superb and tense courtroom drama that interrogated perceptions of criminality and the breakdown of a marriage.

Anatomy of a Fall had won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival in May so it hadn’t come out of nowhere. But the disappointing thing was the conversation was framed as “Triet or Gerwig”. Note it wasn’t “Triet or Martin Scorsese” nor “Triet or Christopher Nolan”.

If Triet was going to get in, the other woman had to come out. Apparently, this year, as in 95 out of 96 years, there wasn’t room for two, let alone three. Imagine that. Three women nominated in best director. The third would and should have been Celine Song for her quietly powerful drama Past Lives.

This year is the 96th Oscars. On average, five directors are nominated every year (in the early days, sometimes it was six, sometimes it was three), which means the Oscars has given out almost 500 directing nominations.

Do you know how many of them have gone to women? Nine.

Only one woman has been nominated twice (Jane Campion in 1993 and 2021) and there was only one year when two were nominated in the same field (Chloe Zhao and Emerald Fennell in 2020).

The other nominees were Gerwig in 2017, Lina Wertmuller in 1976, Sofia Coppola in 2003, Kathryn Bigelow in 2009 and now Justine Triet.

Eight women in total. Three have won – Campion, Zhao and Bigelow. Since 1929.

The directing Oscars nomination list is decided by the directors branch of the Academy, a segment of the organisation that is notoriously still overwhelmingly male and older.

After the “Oscars So White” controversy of 2015, the Academy made a push to significantly expand its voter base to be more inclusive of non-white members, international filmmakers, younger people and women.

That has brought on some changes. Notably, of the eight women nominated for directing, four of them nabbed those honours after 2015.

We all know progress is slow, but does it have to be so glacial?

Elsewhere in the Academy, in branches where there are more representative voting bodies, such as the actors, that expanded membership has led to a diverse slate of acting nominees. This year, that includes Lily Gladstone, America Ferrera, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Danielle Brooks, Jeffrey Wright, Colman Domingo and Sterling K. Brown.

It’s proof that when you broaden the decision makers, you get more exciting line-ups.

Of course, the Gerwig omission isn’t all down to gender biases, conscious or unconscious. There’s also some old-fashioned elitism thrown in.

Barbie is, largely, a comedy. It’s fun and breezy with cracking jokes every minute. It’s also bright, poppy, loud and unapologetically female (oh, there’s that latent sexism again).

The other half of the Barbenheimer phenomenon, Oppenheimer, is the clear frontrunner in best picture and director. Its subject matter and perspective are unapologetically male. It’s war, science, politics, history and explosions.

Neither movies are perfect but Oppenheimer gets a free pass for its overly complicated narrative structure and thinly written female characters. It gets to be taken seriously. And the Oscars, in the venerable estimation of many of its legacy members, has to be serious business.

And the Oscars is still a genre snob. Even some male directors have struggled to overcome that, such as French-Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve when his sci-fi action film Dune was nominated for 10 Oscars but none of them were for best director.

When you combine Barbie’s handicaps of being pink and a comedy, we shouldn’t be that surprised Gerwig was shut out. But it still sucks.