Greta Gerwig opens up about Academy Awards snub
Director Greta Gerwig and actor Margot Robbie’s omission from the 2024 Oscar nominations for their global hit ‘Barbie’ stirred disappointment among moviegoers. While controversies often surround Oscar nominations, this instance sparked heightened scrutiny, raising questions of sexism.
Despite the snub, Gerwig is overall happy with Barbie’s performance, including at the 96th Academy Awards where it earned eight nominations, though she had anticipated a nomination for Robbie in the ‘Actress in a Leading Role’ category.
“Of course, I wanted it for Margot,” Gerwig told ‘Time’ during a recent chat. “But I’m just happy we all get to be there together. A friend’s mom said to me, ‘I can’t believe you didn’t get nominated’. I said, ‘But I did. I got an Oscar nomination’. She was like, ‘Oh, that’s wonderful for you!’ I was like, ‘I know!’,” she added, referring to her nomination for ‘Best Adapted Screenplay’.
Grossing more than 1.4 billion dollars at the global box office, ‘Barbie’ was the biggest movie of 2023 and the highest-grossing film ever directed by a woman. “I remember thinking, ‘If this works, everyone is going to think later that it was inevitable’,” she noted. “They’ll say, ‘Well, but it was Barbie’. But this wasn’t guaranteed.”
Once the awards season ends, she’ll begin completely focusing on her two ‘Chronicles of Narnia’ movies, based on author CS Lewis’ novels, for ‘Netflix’. During the interview, Gerwig also mentioned that this is a project she had been gestating for a long time and that she had written a draft of it before ever setting foot on the set of ‘Barbie’. “Knowing that I’d laid the groundwork for ‘Narnia’ and wanted to return to it - that’s probably something I set up for myself psychologically. Because I know the right thing, for me anyway, is to keep making movies. Whatever happens, good or bad, you’ve got to keep going,” she added.
Mentioning that she is drawn to the ‘euphorically dreamlike’ quality of Lewis’ writing, she said, “It’s connected to the folklore and fairy stories of England, but it’s a combination of different traditions. As a child, you accept the whole thing - that you’re in this land of Narnia, there are fauns and then Father Christmas shows up. It doesn’t even occur to you that it’s not schematic. I’m interested in embracing the paradox of the worlds that Lewis created because that’s what’s so compelling about them.”
