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Greta Gerwig, shown here not directing hard enough for the Academy’s liking on the set of Barbie.
Photo: Jaap Buitendijk/Warner Bros.
In 2023, Greta Gerwig became the most successful female director of all time thanks to the box-office power of Barbie. While many people’s contributions helped turn the film into a massive critical and commercial achievement, arguably no one was more crucial to that outcome than Gerwig. Her sensibility — that bubblegum-pink swirl of splashy musical numbers, jokes about the Snyderverse, and commitment to exploring the complexities of the female condition — is what made the film such an odd, delightful, and surprisingly moving work about what it means to be a woman in a world that seems designed to dismiss their capabilities.
Given all of this, Gerwig, who has already been nominated by her peers for a Directors Guild Award, seemed like a near lock for an Oscar nomination in the Best Director category. Yet on Tuesday morning, when those nominations were announced, her name wasn’t called. The general consensus was that Justine Triet, director of Anatomy of a Fall, took what would have been Gerwig’s slot. Because in a year when, in a first, three of the Best Picture nominees were directed by women — Barbie was recognized there alongside Anatomy of a Fall and Celine Song’s Past Lives — there is still room for only one woman in the category that honors the year’s best filmmakers.
America Ferrera, who did get nominated for her performance in Barbie in the Supporting Actress category, addressed Gerwig’s snub in a statement that sounded a lot like her movie monologue. “Greta has done just about everything that a director could do to deserve it,” she said, according to Variety. “Creating this world, and taking something that didn’t have inherent value to most people and making it a global phenomenon. It feels disappointing to not see her on that list.”
This isn’t Gerwig’s first shutout. Her adaptation of Little Women, the only female-directed nominee for 2019’s Best Picture, also didn’t get a nod in the Best Director category after she was edged out by Martin Scorsese and four other guys. Barbie did walk away with eight total nominations, including one for Best Adapted Screenplay, an honor shared by Gerwig and her creative partner and husband, Noah Baumbach. But a Best Director nomination would have been for her alone and would have acknowledged that the movie that had the broadest cultural impact in the past year — at the box office, in the Zeitgeist, hell, even on the interest in Oscar front-runner Oppenheimer — could have not have done so without a woman at the helm.
While some progress has been made, let’s face it: Hollywood still appears to be one big mojo dojo casa house. This whole awards season has been hinting at a Gerwig snub. Take Jo Koy’s dumb joke at the Golden Globes about Barbie being a movie “about a doll with big boobies.” It felt like Koy was speaking the quiet part out loud and giving voice to some Hollywood insiders who couldn’t possibly vote for Gerwig because Barbie wasn’t a real film.
During the Critics’ Choice Awards, Barbie won several awards. But not one of them, aside from the SeeHer Award that was presented to Ferrera, was broadcast during the CW telecast until host Chelsea Handler went rogue and insisted that Gerwig and Margot Robbie, Barbie’s star and executive producer, make an acceptance speech for winning Best Comedy. (Robbie was also omitted from the Best Actress category, which means that Ken, who is just Ken, got a nomination and Barbie, who is everything, did not.) During some of the other precursor awards, like the National Board of Review and New York Film Critics Circle, the film was ignored altogether.
“Always stand out and always be grateful,” Ferrera’s Gloria said in Barbieland. “But never forget that the system is rigged.” Even though Barbie got those eight nominations and three of the Best Picture contenders were made by women, the system still feels rigged on a day like today, when Song didn’t get the director’s nomination she also deserved and Ava DuVernay’s Origin was nowhere to be found.
If a man had made Barbie, I contend that it would have gotten that Best Director nomination. But a man couldn’t have made Barbie. No one could have except for Greta Gerwig.
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