Mendelson's Musings: How Barbie, Netflix and Godzilla Fared At the 2024 Oscar Nominations

Netflix remains a contender (and helps spread the wealth) as Gerwig and Robbie get "snubbed" while Godzilla becomes an Academy Award nominee

Pardon the delinquency, I over-slept this morning and I was on “taking kids to school” duty from 7:30 am to 10:00 am (one kid goes at 8, another at 9 and the last at 10). Anyway, I’m going to assume you have a general idea of who and what got nominated by who and what, so this won’t be a rundown of every nomination in every category. Offhand, Universal’s Oppenheimer (the likely frontrunner for Best Picture and Best Director) earned 13 nominations while Searchlight’s Poor Things earned 11. Apple/Paramount’s Killers of the Flower Moon nabbed ten nods while Warner Bros. Discovery’s Barbie scored eight and Amazon MGM’s American Fiction earned five.

Barbie wins and loses…

While a tech win or two will probably prevent this, there is now at least a chance that Barbie will be represented in the Oscars winner’s circle by Ryan Gosling winning Best Supporting Actor for playing Ken and his anthem “I’m Just Ken” (courtesy of Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt) winning Best Original Song. If that isn’t a case of subtext-meets-text in terms of what the movie is actually about and who benefits most even from a female-driven critically-acclaimed blockbuster… Recall that by far the biggest beneficiary from the zeitgeist-representing success of HBO’s Girls was Adam Driver.

Yes, it’s a slight shock that Margot Robbie missed Best Actress and that Greta Gerwig again missed out on Best Director for her third-straight Best Picture nominated feature. To be fair, neither director Joseph Kosinski nor Tom Cruise made the cut last year for Top Gun: Maverick under similar circumstances. Meanwhile, Barbie co-star America Ferrera ended up in the Best Supporting Actress category, perhaps the morning’s biggest surprise, feels at least partially due to her character’s buzzy “No right way to be a woman!” speech.

A slew of first-time nominees

Or, maybe they really liked her key supporting turn and wanted to reward a longtime in-the-trenches vet (Real Women Have Curves was 22 years ago). Ditto long-time listener, first-time callers Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Danielle Brooks, Da'Vine Joy Randolph, Sandra Hüller, Jeffrey Wright (my “if I was an Academy member” pick for Best Actor) and Sterling K. Brown (ditto, respectively) among others.

I’d argue the high-profile omissions for Gerwig and Robbie increases the chances of Gerwig and Noah Bambach’’s screenplay winning in the Best Adapted category (following some manufactured controversy from folks who don’t know how the screenplay categories operate when it comes to established IP), but all five nominees are also Best Picture nominees.

The Best Original Screenplay category went 4/5 in that regard, with Samy Burch & Alex Mechanik’s Netflix festival pick-up May December making the cut over Martin Scorsese and Eric Roth’s adaption of Killers of the Flower Moon. Amusingly, my wife didn’t care much for the movie arguing that she felt the adaptation actually lessened Mollie Kyle’s role compared to the book. For that matter, Leonardo DiCaprio missing Best Actor was a little surprising, as was the inclusion of Colman Domingo (also a longtime character actor/first-time nominee) for Netflix’s Rustin.

Lily Gladstone (the tenth of ten first-timers this year) is the first Native American actress to score a Best Actress Oscar nomination — even if I’d argue she’s in the wrong category. Domingo joins Ian McKellen (for Gods and Monsters in 1999) as just the second openly-gay actor to nab an Oscar nod for playing a true-life gay character. Likewise, Jodie Foster won two Oscars for The Accused and The Silence of the Lambs and was nominated for Taxi Driver and Nell, but this is the first time the openly lesbian actress (who should have also won in 1998 for Contact, dammit) has been nominated for playing a lesbian character.