2024's Oscar nominees complicate 2023's year of girlhood

Movies celebrating female adolescence like Barbie and Priscilla made a huge splash this year. How did they fare with the Academy?

By Emma Keates | January 23, 2024 | 5:51pm

Aux Features Oscar

2024's Oscar nominees complicate 2023's year of girlhood

Barbie; Priscilla Photo: Warner Bros. Pictures; A24

In December, The Cut deemed 2023 “The Year Of The Girl.” It’s not hard to see why. Last year—specifically last summer—was defined by a feeling best encapsulated as “girlhood.” Those months spawned the terms “girl dinner” and “girl math.” Beyoncé and Taylor Swift sold out stadium after stadium after stadium. Fashion was defined by the coquette aesthetic and people of all ages wore bows in their hair. And Barbie was at the center of it all.

Now, five months later, the Oscars look a little like a Mojo Dojo Casa House of their own. In a pretty frustrating example of life imitating art, Ryan Gosling was nominated for playing Ken in Barbie this morning, but Margot Robbie failed to score a Best Actress nomination for playing Barbie herself. (This isn’t to take away from Gosling’s performance at all; it just would have been nice to see Barbie nominated for Barbie.) While Billie Eilish’s aching “What Was I Made For?” earned a well-deserved Best Original Song nod, Gosling’s “I’m Just Ken” shut out other female artists from both the Barbie soundtrack and elsewhere on the longlist. (We would have loved to see Olivia Rodrigo recognized for “Can’t Catch Me Now,” for example.) Greta Gerwig was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay alongside her partner, Noah Baumbach, but she was cut from the Best Director list completely. Her only other shot (along with Margot Robbie’s only shot) at an award is through the Best Picture category, one Barbie likely won’t win.

Most Popular

Barbie isn’t the only movie about female adolescence that was given less than its due by the Academy. Despite undeniable achievement in at least Costume Design, Makeup and Hairstyling, and Cinematography, Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla was shut out from award contention completely. 25-year-old Cailee Spaeny won Venice’s Best Actress prize for her delicate and layered portrayal of Priscilla Presley throughout multiple phases of her life, but has barely received any recognition since then. She was nominated for a Golden Globe and Gotham Award, but missed out here and at the BAFTAs, including in the Rising Star Award category, for which her co-star, Jacob Elordi, was nominated. Just yesterday, we learned that Apple made the eyebrow-raising decision to pull funding from Coppola’s next intended project, a Florence Pugh-led adaptation of Edith Wharton’s The Custom Of The Country that the director described as being akin to “five Marie Antoinettes.” Coppola was also shut out of the nominations for both Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay this morning.

All of this, of course, comes after Jo Koy’s tasteless Golden Globes “joke” that “Oppenheimer is based on a 721-page Pulitzer Prize-winning book about the Manhattan Project, and Barbie is on a plastic doll with big boobies.” While today’s nominations went largely as expected and some incredibly talented and deserving people were rightfully recognized, these omissions still sting. It’s hard not to wonder whether the energy of this past summer will be as fleeting as the notion of girlhood itself.

Women did break records at the Oscars

Still, while stories about young women might not have gotten much attention by the Academy this year (at least Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos’ offbeat spin on a similar concept, scored 11 nominations), female filmmakers and artists did make history. Gerwig’s Barbie, Celine Song’s Past Lives, and Justine Triet’s Anatomy Of A Fall were all nominated for Best Picture, marking the first time the category has featured three female directors in the Awards’ entire 96-year history.

With her additional nomination for Best Director, Justine Triet becomes only the eighth woman honored in this category since the Oscars began. Her predecessors include Jane Campion (Power Of The Dog and The Piano), Chloe Zhao (Nomadland), Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker), and Lina Wentmuller (Seven Beauties). They also include Coppola (Lost In Translation), Gerwig (Lady Bird), and Emerald Fennell (Promising Young Woman), all of whom were in conversation for the award this year but failed to secure a nomination.

History was made on the acting side as well. With her nominations for Best Actress and Best Picture for Poor Things (on which she’s credited as a producer), Emma Stone became only the second woman to be recognized in these two major categories in the same year. (The first was Frances McDormand in 2020 for Nomadland.) Killers Of The Flower Moon’s Lily Gladstone was also nominated for Best Actress, making her the first Native American person to ever compete for a competitive acting Academy Award (per The New York Times.)

Still, while all of these nominations are undeniable achievements, the fact that any of them still feel this notable in 2024 is staggering. Just look at how small the pool of female directors that have even gotten close to this height still is. We’ve gotten to a place where a movie about Barbie can be taken (somewhat) seriously, which certainly isn’t nothing, but we still have a long way to go.