‘Barbie’ receives 8 Oscar nominations, but what about Kenough?

Barbie Received Eight Oscar Nominated Best Adapted Screenplays for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and Its Role in What Is Happening Everywhere, Everywhere

There is always at least one screenplay to debate when the Oscar nominations are announced. Last year, in fact, there were two, and I regularly get collared by people wondering: What in the world were “Glass Onion” and “Top Gun: Maverick” doing in the best adapted screenplay bucket? Adapted from what? Was there some secret book about fighter pilots or tech mogul whodunits they’d missed?

Nope. There’s also no previous story about a Barbie who starts thinking about death and sets out on an existential journey. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences decided to include “Barbie” in their adapted category, despite it being ineligible for the Oscars.

Judd Apatow declared the reclassification of “Barbie,” the biggest movie of 2023 any way you slice it, “insulting” to its writers, Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach. In the original screenplay category, moving Barbie from best to adapted was a change in fortunes for the film. Now, alongside a slate that includes the juggernaut “Oppenheimer,” it’s a horse race. I don’t know what will win.

The academy does not distinguish original and adapted works, but it does post some of its Oscar rules publicly. The Writers Guild of America is the union of Hollywood’s scripters. And for the most part, judging from Oscar history, they’re in sync. Sequels, remakes and screenplays that are based on underlying material are considered to be non-original and in awards contexts are usually classified as adaptation. Original screenplays either are not based on material (generally as stipulated in the writer’s contract), or they’re based on a nonfiction book that doesn’t have a narrative, like a study of sailing ships in the 19th century.

To be clear, Barbie received eight Oscar nominations on Tuesday morning, including for Best Picture. Ryan Gosling had a nomination for the best supporting actor. America perra was nominated for best supporting actress. Barbie was a nominee for costume design, production design and adapted screenplay.

But director Greta Gerwig was overlooked in favor of Jonathan Glazer (The Zone of Interest), Yorgos Lanthimos (Poor Things) Both Christopher Nolan and Martin Scorsese directed films. One female director was nominated — Justine Triet helmed the acclaimed French courtroom drama, Anatomy of a Fall, which won the Palme d’Or at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival.

In a statement, Ryan Gosling said, “There is no Barbie movie without Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie, the two people most responsible for this history-making, globally-celebrated film.”

Now, it should be added that Gerwig and Robbie were nominated — just not for best director and best actress. Gerwig got a nod for best adapted screenplay for the film, which she co-wrote with Noah Baumbach. As a producer for the film, she helped convince the company to take risks in how the character is portrayed.

“It’s complicated,” Holmes continues, “because people think of movies as directors’ projects, so how can you be nominated for best picture and not best director? But with the math being the way it is now, if you have 10 best picture nominees [and only five directing nominees], you’re going to have a bunch of directors not nominated. Gerwig wasn’t nominated in that category, but neither was Bradley Cooper. Neither was Alexander Payne. Neither was Cord Jefferson. The academy was never not going to nominate Christopher Nolan or Scorsese. If Gerwig had been nominated, it probably would have been Justine Triet who wasn’t, and that would have been a shame, too.”