Sorry, girls, Director Barbie is currently unavailable

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This article was published 25/01/2024 (941 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Last summer’s Barbie movie joyfully declared that Barbies could be anything. They could be President Barbie, Judge Barbie, Author Barbie, Physicist Barbie, Journalist Barbie.

But with this week’s announcement of the 2023 Oscar nominations, it seems that Director Barbie remains frustratingly out of reach.

The Barbie movie snagged a Best Picture nomination, but there was no corresponding recognition for helmer Greta Gerwig. This nominating model, in which the movie itself is lauded but the woman who made it is ignored is also seen in the case of Celine Song, the Korean-Canadian filmmaker whose Past Lives received nods for Best Picture and Best Screenplay but was overlooked for director.

So why does the awards-season buzz around laudable female-led films sometimes sideline the actual women involved?

It’s partly that the directorial mystique remains stubbornly macho, not having changed that much since the days of the stereotypical man in jodhpurs, striding around with a riding crop and screaming into a megaphone.

According to much-repeated right-wing rants, Hollywood is supposedly the epicentre of American “wokeness.” It’s all loony-left and liberal, having gone haywire with Equity, Inclusivity and Diversity initiatives.

In fact, if you crunch the numbers, the gender and racial diversity on big-budget studio pictures remains dismal, usually far lower with than your average super-capitalist Fortune 500 company.

The are small, hopeful glints of progress. Justine Triet, Anatomy of a Fall director, was nominated for Best Director this year — good news for a great film — but this is only the ninth time a woman has been nominated in 96 years of Oscar history. (And it’s only eight women: Jane Campion has been nominated twice.)

In recent years, the disconnect between Best Picture and Best Director is partly just arithmetic, as the Best Picture category has expanded to 10 while the Best Director category stays at five. (So, yes, fellas get left out, too.)

But there are other factors. In what could be a bit of self-replicating, circular reality, the voting pool for the Best Director award — which is other directors — still skews strongly male. The vote for Best Picture, on the other hand, is open to the entire (somewhat more varied) Academy membership.

Films that are big and ambitious and heavy

The director category also tends to favour films that are big and ambitious and heavy.

While those odd cinematic step-siblings Oppenheimer and Barbie may have come together to save the summer box office and get people back in theatres, the voters for Best Director tend to be more OppenBarbie than Barbenheimer.

This is not to take anything away from Christopher Nolan’s work on Oppenheimer, which took the often conventional genre of the historical biopic and made it magnificently strange and difficult. But it seems hard that populist success is actually a liability for Gerwig’s big, pink blockbuster, which made over $1.44 billion.

Some voters could be reacting to the fact Gerwig made a movie based on a mass-produced plastic toy, most previous examples of this — think Michael Bay and the Transformers franchise — being dire.

But think how good a director Gerwig had to be to make a Mattel doll come to life. You could argue Gerwig should actually get extra points for “degree of difficulty” — like in figure-skating scoring.

I mean, it’s easy to convey a serious message in a film about the man who helped develop the atomic bomb. But to be serious — and subversive and rebellious and raging and funny — in a movie whose heroine lives in a pink Dreamhouse with a heart-shaped bed and a slide? That’s something.

Gerwig’s skill as a director comes out in the film’s tricky little tonal tightrope, a mix of sparkly, self-aware camp and genuine poignance. She does some fabulously surreal, exquisitely detailed world building — which led to a pink paint shortage — and pulls off some real technical feats. The musical sequences in Barbie, for example, are way more imaginative and fun than the numbers in Mean Girls — which is based on an actual Broadway musical.

And Gerwig got people talking, from alt-right haters to second-wave feminist doubters to enthusiastic gen-Z fans.

After this week’s Oscar announcements, Ryan Gosling, who was nominated for Best Supporting Actor for his sly turn as Ken, said he felt honoured his work was recognized but disappointed in the omission of both director Gerwig and star Margot Robbie. “To say that I’m disappointed that they are not nominated in their respective categories would be an understatement,” he said in a statement.

But patriarchy is “not just about horses,” as Ken would say. It’s also about entrenched and systemic power hierarchies. As late-night show host Jimmy Kimmel pointed out, Gosling getting an Academy Award nomination while Gerwig and Robbie are passed over is “kind of the plot of the Barbie movie.”

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca