Why Barbie Will Win Best Picture
'Tis 10 days until the Oscars, and no less than 10 films are ramping up their campaigns in a last-minute push for the top prize of them all, Best Picture. The biggest award has the potential to be either one of the most anticlimactic or most surprising result in recent years. The former is true, because one film has won the vast majority of the top prizes on the awards circuit thus far, the gargantuan Oppenheimer. However, not only would the 3+ hour, half black-and-white, half color biopic be a wildly abnormal winner, few if any other top contenders are traditional 'Oscar bait,' and none also are without its detractors.
Those facts, as well as the Oscars' less predictable preferential voting system means that no nominee can truly be counted out of the race. Spotlight's and Moonlight's back-to-back upsets in 2016 and 2017, Parasite's stunner in 2020, and CODA's late surge in 2022 all taught us to expect the unexpected, so we're here to give fans of all 10 nominees reason to believe on Sunday the 10th.
To kick off this series, I'm starting with the one nominee I can guarantee everybody tuning in to next weekend's Academy Awards has at least heard of, if not seen, if not seen multiple times. I'm speaking, of course, of Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie's Barbie.
If you weren't on Twitter (or at least in film Twitter circles) to hear the excitement about the Barbie movie from its very inception, you would have to have been living under a rock to not be aware of its release in summer 2023. The film's marketing was next-level-- and, truth be told, wholly unnecessary; excitement for this movie was entirely organic, based simply on the people involved in the project. Then there was the little Internet-manufactured phenomenon of 'Barbenheimer," a de facto call to arms to get people to the movie theatres to "enjoy" a double feature of what was at least anticipated to be, and to most moviegoers successfully was, a 1-2 punch of hilariously different but equally brilliant films. Barbenheimer was a hilarious but wonderful cultural moment, and also an unparalleled box office success, but there's no question what the stronger 'half' was, in terms of figures. Barbie shattered box office records left and right, ultimately surpassing $1.3 billion worldwide, and becoming the highest-grossing comedy ever, the fastest Warner Bros. film to cross the billion mark, and the highest-gorssing film ever by a female director in the process.
Those commercial achievements are and should be at the crux of any arguments that Barbie, a film that is yet to collect top honors at any forerunning awards shows but has consistently been among the conteders, could actually win Best Picture at the Oscars. I say that not as way of arguing it doesn't deserve it on its own merits, to be clear, but rather as a nod to the Academy's crass motivations. The Oscars haven't exactly been shy in recent years about their increasingly desperate attempts to stay relevant. It's what has caused them to tinker with the ceremony in recent years to include more musical performances by big pop stars, award some categories during commercial breaks to cut down on airtime for 'non-onscreen talent,' nominate more Marvel movies for major awards, and even discuss introducing an Academy Award for "Acheivement in Popular Film." Had that award come to fruition, as it did at the Golden Globes, there's no question Barbie would be the winner, as it was at this year's Golden Globes.
But even considering its immense box office success, I would hesitate to think a film like this had any chance at winning Best Picture at the Oscars... were it not for the winner last year. In Everything Everywhere All At Once, which somewhat shockingly took awards season by storm last year, Academy voters opted for the cultural zeitgeist over the traditional fare. The reigning champion was a wild, chaotic, deeply original, absurd and hilarious movie that audiences of all ages could enjoy, with a poignant meaning underpinning it that so many people resonated with. If it wasn't already exceedingly obvious how many women in particular felt that poignant relatability with this movie too, the outpouring of anger, sadness and exasperation that followed the Oscar nominations announcement which excluded Greta Gerwig from the Best Director field and Margot Robbie from the Best Actress field made it abundantly clear. Maybe, just maybe, the Academy recognizes this as a golden opportunity to establish some goodwill while simultaneously realize their clear goal to reach a wider audience by giving top honors to the buzziest movie of the year.
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