On the menu today: We turn from the tumult of politics and the 2024 presidential campaign to a realm of simmering outrage, unscrupulous ethics, big money, sharp elbows, secret deals, knee-jerk accusations, and social-media rage: who gets nominated for what Academy Award, and how the decisions of a tiny pool of voters in the film industry allegedly reflect deep-rooted problems all across American society.
Yes, We Ken
I think it was Mickey Kaus, a long, long time ago, who said that you should not look to Hollywood, particularly movies, for works of art or stories that “capture the zeitgeist” — the general intellectual, moral, and cultural climate of an era.
If I remember correctly, Kaus argued that the process of filmmaking is too slow, and the pace of change in our culture is too fast, for a creative mind to put together a film that captures the moment when it appears before audiences.
Films are often written, pitched, approved, produced, and edited over a period of several years before they appear in theaters. For example, last summer’s blockbuster Oppenheimer is based upon a book that was published in 2005, and for almost two decades, the idea of a biopic about J. Robert Oppenheimer and the building of an atomic bomb kicked around Hollywood. Director Christopher Nolan didn’t read the book until 2021. By Hollywood standards, he wrote the screenplay quickly, and filming occurred from February to May 2022.
If a movie seems to capture the particular mood of the time period it is released in, it’s a nice coincidence, but almost impossible to pull off as a deliberate act. Can you look at the film Oppenheimer and see parallels to modern issues of the development of artificial intelligence, quantum computing, hypersonic weapons, the war in Ukraine, potential conflict with China, partisan rivalries in Washington, and so on? Sure. But A) Nolan didn’t set out to make a movie that was a metaphor or parallel to those particular issues, or if he did, it took a back seat to his aim of telling the story as he chose; and B) those issues are lingering, and have been emerging as concerns for several years.
(It’s a Christopher Nolan film, so he chose to tell his story non-sequentially. If you ask Nolan to tell you about the football game on Sunday, he’ll begin, “Midway through the second quarter, the home team is driving down the field. But then, let me tell you about the National Anthem. The game came down to the last play, which was amazing — but let’s go back to what we saw in the halftime show. And then, the opening drive, which set the tone for the entire game, and then, the quarterback’s first game as a starter in high school.”)
But if you see something happening in this moment, in January 2024, and decide to make a blockbuster movie about it, you’ll have a hard time getting it in front of audiences before 2026. And by then, the moment will have passed and the circumstances will have changed.
Throughout the second half of last year, we were told, over and over again, that Barbie’s pink “captured the zeitgeist,” that the film “undeniably captured the zeitgeist of the summer,” that it “successfully captured the cultural zeitgeist,” that “pink has dominated in both the box office and the zeitgeist,” that it was “capturing the social media zeitgeist,” that “even AI-generated Barbieheimer fanart captures the zeitgeist”. . . you get the idea.
I mention all this because Hillary Clinton has weighed in on director Greta Gerwig and actress Margot Robbie not getting nominated for Oscars for their work in Barbie.
Nor is this just a matter of Clinton grabbing onto a controversy to keep herself relevant. No less an institution than the Associated Press declared, “Greta Gerwig not being among the five best director nominees for this year’s Oscars is one of the biggest shocks in recent memory.” Yup, that strikes me as a solid list of biggest shocks in recent memory: 9/11, the Great Recession, Covid, and Greta Gerwig not getting a Best Director nomination. These are the times that try men’s — er, people’s souls.
Oliver Darcy of CNN contended the snubs represented classic Hollywood sexism — even though Gerwig and Robbie were nominated for other Oscars:
The move by the Academy, which is no stranger to controversy and has faced a torrent of criticism in recent years over issues related to diversity, left a fair share of observers astonished and shaking their heads. It was widely expected that Gerwig, in particular, would get a nod for best director, given that she was the creative force behind the critically-acclaimed billion-dollar sensation, which the academy itself recognized by nominating it for best picture.
To many, the snubbing of the pair further validated the film’s message about how difficult it can be for women to succeed in — and be recognized for — their contributions in a society saturated by sexism. While Gerwig did receive a nomination for best adapted screenplay and Robbie was given the nod as a producer, they won’t compete for the year’s most prestigious prizes.
This is not a newsletter about whether Gerwig and Robbie deserved Oscar nominations. I didn’t see the movie, I didn’t see most of the movies featuring the other actresses and directors nominated, and in the end, I don’t care. This is a newsletter about the fact that so many people who don’t work in Hollywood feel emotionally invested in whether Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie deserved Oscar nominations, and how who gets which awards in Hollywood has turned into a proxy fight over whether women and minorities are getting what they deserve for their work.
Now, I know that there’s a good chance that you don’t care about the Oscars. Audience viewership has declined dramatically compared to decades ago, although it increased slightly last year.
But the industry of Hollywood gets a lot more public attention and discussion than almost any other industry in America. Perhaps only music and professional sports come close. The amount of money at stake in the pharmaceutical, banking and finance, insurance, automotive, and energy industries dwarfs that of Hollywood and the entertainment industry. But no one goes into a darkened, air-conditioned theater in summer to watch an oil rig for two hours, and almost no one outside of those who work in those industries watches the awards shows for those industries. People care about which movie is the biggest blockbuster of the year, and which one wins Best Picture, in a way that people don’t care about which health-insurance plan is rated highest of the year. Every industry has fabulously wealthy people at the top. Hollywood has fabulously wealthy people at the top, and lots of famous and beautiful and glamorous people, too.
In other words, almost anything that is considered a big deal in Hollywood gets discussed, and treated, as if it is a big deal for America, even if the number of people it affects is an exceptionally small minority of the country as a whole.
Back in 2015, Patricia Arquette concluded her speech accepting the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her performance in Boyhood by declaring, “To every woman who gave birth, to every taxpayer and citizen of this nation, we have fought for everybody else’s equal rights, it’s our time to have wage equality once and for all, and equal rights for women in the United States of America.” There’s been a longstanding complaint among Hollywood actresses that they get paid significantly less than their male co-stars for comparable work — with some films featuring a gap of millions between the lead actor and actress. No doubt, lots of people react with the sentiment, “Cry me a river, you’re still getting paid millions.” But no one likes being underpaid, and the inherent message is that what you do is less valuable than what your co-worker does.
But at the 2015 Academy Awards, just about everyone who decides the level pay for actresses in movies was in that room. If you or I think Patricia Arquette deserves more money for her next movie, it doesn’t matter. We, the audience, have almost zero influence over the decision-making of Hollywood studios, and we certainly don’t have any influence over how much each person in the cast and crew gets paid. Maybe we indirectly influence which movies get made by which ones we decide to go see. But even that requires studio heads to heed the correct lessons from audience viewing habits and preferences.
Underpaid actresses are not a problem driven by a phenomenon of an abstract, national, or international patriarchy. The problem is driven by the decisions of perhaps a dozen or so heads of movie studios.
God only knows how much behind-the-scenes lobbying, arm-twisting, horse-trading, or other deals generated the nominations for this year’s Oscars. But what we’re seeing here is an argument that the lack of nominations for Gerwig and Robbie represents some sort of insult or denigration of women. This is a particularly odd argument in the case of Robbie, as everyone who got a nomination instead of her is a woman, too. (They’re also all born women, but that’s another controversy for another day.) And in the case of every award, you’d have to decide who didn’t deserve a Best Actress or Best Director nomination, and whom Robbie and Gerwig should have replaced. Again, I don’t feel qualified to make that judgment, because I didn’t see any of the movies in question. But I have yet to see anyone who looked at the Best Actress nominees or Best Director nominees and thought, “Oh, that one stinks. That one completely didn’t deserve that nomination.”
Finally, let’s note that by touting their film as pro-woman and feminist, the makers of Barbie attempted to critic-proof it. In the eyes of a lot of people — almost all on the political left — to criticize the film itself was to criticize women. There’s a hilarious defensiveness in a column this morning from the New York Times’ Pamela Paul:
Can I say that, despite winsome leads and likable elements, it didn’t cohere or accomplish anything interesting, without being written off as a) mean, b) old, c) hateful or d) humorless ?
Every once in a while, a movie is so broadly anticipated, so welcomed, so celebrated that to disparage it felt like a deliberate provocation. After “Barbie” so buoyantly lifted box office figures, it also felt like a willful dismissal of the need to make Hollywood solvent after a season of hell. And it felt like a political statement. Disliking “Barbie” meant either dismissing the power of The Patriarchy or dismissing Modern Feminism. You were either anti-feminist or too feminist or just not the right kind.
Whether you want to call it wokeness, or political correctness, or whatever other term you prefer, the discussion around Barbie reflects an increasingly common move in Hollywood to associate your film or show with a cause, and then to act as if any criticism of the film or show represents criticism of that cause. The more this works, the more we’ll get heavy-handed, insufferable message movies.
Thus, Margot Robbie not getting a Best Actress nomination — in a field that features Annette Bening, Lily Gladstone, Sandra Hüller, Carey Mulligan, and Emma Stone — represents sexism.
ADDENDUM: Christian Schneider reminds us that this weekend, Ron DeSantis endorsed the man who’d previously shared a photo of him with the caption, “Here is Ron DeSantimonious grooming high school girls with alcohol as a teacher.”
Think about what it would take to endorse a man who said something like that about you.