‘Barbie’ Oscars Category Shakeup Had a Disappointing Domino Effect

One of the most peculiar upsets of this year’s Oscars season occurred well before the nominees were announced earlier today.

The Academy attracted a fair amount of attention after deciding to slot Barbie in for contention in the Best Adapted Screenplay category at the 2024 Oscars, despite Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie’s box office juggernaut initially campaigning for Best Original Screenplay.

Now, anyone familiar with Barbie‘s screenplay should have no trouble figuring out that calling it an adapted screenplay is a decidedly wicked insult to Gerwig and Noah Baumbach’s wildly original ideas. Not that adapted screenplays are inherently lesser, but the specific creative skill that comes with writing an original screenplay—a skill that’s definitively represented throughout Barbie—deserves to be recognized appropriately. And now that the Oscar nominees have been announced, there are apparently even more casualties.

As of this morning, American Fiction, Barbie, Poor Things, Oppenheimer, and The Zone of Interest have all been confirmed as nominees for Best Adapted Screenplay. While all five nominees are more than deserving of their spots, Barbie’s presence in this category rather than Best Original Screenplay is likely the reason that Killers of the Flower Moon—the Martin Scorsese film based on David Grann’s non-fiction book of the same name—missed out on the nomination.

Flower Moon missing out on a Best Adapted Screenplay nom is arguably worse than moving Barbie from Original to Adapted Screenplay, especially considering that the former was almost certainly a direct result of the latter. The final scene in Flower Moon—in which Scorsese actively invites audiences to consider the fundamental limits of telling a story like this through the filmmaking lens of a white man such as himself—was a stroke of genius that could have guaranteed the nomination right then and there, to say nothing of the deftness with which the rest of the screenplay helps elevate the piercing subject matter.

Meanwhile, Maestro is occupying the Best Original Screenplay spot that Barbie would have no doubt nabbed if it had been rightfully kept in the category, and that’s coming from someone who is relatively fond of Maestro. Indeed, for all the vilification the film has received this season—some of it very justified, some of it not—Maestro nevertheless has its strengths; the screenplay is not one of them.

So, in one clumsy move, the Academy has managed to deprive Killers of the Flower Moon of a much-deserved screenplay nod; dishonor the striking creativity of Gerwig and Baumbach’s Barbie script; give Maestro another awards foothold that it neither needed, deserved, or has any real chance of winning anyway; and subsequently made the Best Original Screenplay category less competitive and, by extension, less interesting. Take a bow, Oscars voters, and then keep your heads hung.

(featured image: Paramount Pictures / Apple Original Films / Warner Bros. / Netflix)