THE ACADEMY AWARDS have looked a little different these past few years. Work by heavyweight directors with long, lauded careers — your Spielbergs, your PTAs, your Camerons — has been beaten by a band of filmmakers — the Daniels, Bong Joon-ho, Sian Heder — who are brand-new to awards season, and who are telling different kinds of stories, often radically so.
In the list of contenders for 2024, they don’t come much more radical than Barbie. Sure, it doesn’t have the underdog appeal of last year’s awards-season-sweeper Everything Everywhere All At Once; with its global fandom and eye-watering box-office takings, Barbie is nothing short of a cinematic phenomenon. Yet it still packs a powerful message about gender and identity issues beneath its pretty, plastic veneer. It would be a monumental win in a category that thus far has shunned films with big feminist themes, and the first time that a clear-cut comedy would claim the top prize since Annie Hall in 1977. And it doesn’t sacrifice its sense of style in doing so, with three-time Oscar nominee Greta Gerwig channelling everyone from Powell & Pressburger to Stanley Kubrick in Barbie’s journey of self-discovery. In fact, with its homages to films like Wizard Of Oz and 2001: A Space Odyssey, it couldn’t look more like an Oscar-winner-in-the-making.