It may have only won one award, but Greta Gerwig’s blockbuster comedy Barbie was a constant presence at the 96th Oscars.
Most of the awards that were given out on the stage of the Dolby Theatre at Sunday night’s Academy Awards were predictable. But that doesn’t mean they were bad or unimaginative choices, because the 96th Academy Awards managed to stick to the script but also do a pretty good job of summing up a stormy year in Hollywood but a very good year for movies.
“Oppenheimer” was the big winner, of course, just as everybody thought it would be. But Yorgos Lanthimos’ “Poor Things” snuck in and won a trio of tech awards and then a big Best Actress Oscar for Emma Stone that denied Lily Gladstone and left “Killers of the Flower Moon” with 10 nominations and zero wins. Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest” added an entirely appropriate Best Sound award to go with the Best International Feature Film Oscar it was favored to win.
And the screenplay awards were a case study in how voters did what was expected but also managed to be very satisfying in the process: Best Original Screenplay went to “Anatomy of a Fall,” a thorny drama that mixed French and English dialogue and came out of the Cannes Film Festival; Best Adapted Screenplay went to “American Fiction,” a genre-hopping comedy from Cord Jefferson, a Black former journalist and TV writer who’d never before written and directed a movie. The latter award was in a category that also included “Oppenheimer,” meaning that this was the rare year in which the Best Picture winner did not also win a screenplay award.
But if “Poor Things,” “The Zone of Interest,” “Anatomy of a Fall” and “American Fiction” helped round out what will go down in history as the “Oppenheimer” Oscars, you also have to give a big assist to “Barbie.” Greta Gerwig’s blockbuster film only won one award, for Billie Eilish and Finneas O’Connell’s song “What Was I Made For?,” but it got constant shout-outs and delivered the show’s most elaborate performance, Ryan Gosling’s cast-of-thousands romp through “I’m Just Ken.
