When the Oscar nominations were released last month and Greta Gerwig’s name was conspicuously missing from the Best Director lineup, you could feel the Best Adapted Screenplay race shift in real time. A category that had seemed like an Oppenheimer layup suddenly felt like ground zero for a #JusticeForGreta movement. There’s both a precedent and a logic to that thinking; outrage over Ben Affleck’s omission from the Best Director field in 2013 is widely believed to have pushed Argo to its Best Picture win, and we know Oscar voters frequently try to spread the wealth. But regardless of what reasons voters are swayed by, Barbie is the deserving winner of this year’s Best Adapted Screenplay prize, and that fact has nothing to do with what happened in another race.
More than anything else, Barbie is an idea. It wasn’t adapted from any single book, but dozens of them. And also dozens of cartoons and short movies and over 60 years of a toy line that releases new products constantly. Barbie adapted a character and the world she inhabits, but it didn’t adapt a story—an established structure with narrative beats to use as a blueprint. That’s why Warner Bros. and the Barbie campaign team tried to argue that the script wasn’t “adapted” at all, but rather that it should be eligible in the Best Original Screenplay race. That argument inevitably didn’t fly with the Academy, because Oscar eligibility rules clearly stipulate that if your script uses preexisting characters, then you wrote an adaptation of those characters. (Hence why Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery and Top Gun: Maverick both competed as adapted screenplays last year, despite having no source materials for their stories.)
Make the Case: The 2024 Oscar Winners We Want to See
Ringer writers have lots of opinions about the Oscars: Barbie should get Best Adapted Screenplay; Robert De Niro deserves Best Supporting Actor. Follow along as we make our best arguments for the Oscars we want to see ahead of the 96th Academy Awards on March 10!
- Daniel Joyaux: Barbie Turned the Abstract Into a Cohesive Script. It Deserves the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar.
- Keith Phipps: Robert De Niro Continues to Evolve, Persevere, and Challenge Himself. He Should Win Another Oscar.
- Adam Nayman: From Superhero to Villain: Robert Downey Jr.’s ‘Oppenheimer’ Turn Was Undeniable
- Paul Thompson: Just Do It Already. Give Bradley Cooper a Damn Oscar.
- Julianna Ress: ‘May December’ Found a Delicate Balance to Tell a Disturbing Tale
It can’t be overstated how difficult of an adaptation feat it is to capture the essence—and all of the disparate, important elements—of an entire mythology without using any specific stories as source material. It’s why I still think Christopher Nolan’s most impressive work of screenwriting was adapting the Dark Knight script from hundreds and hundreds of different Batman and Joker stories published over a nearly 70-year span without directly adapting any of them. The Academy doesn’t necessarily respect that, though. One of the funniest Oscar nominations in history was Kenneth Branagh’s Best Adapted Screenplay nod for 1996’s Hamlet, in which he famously didn’t alter a single word from Shakespeare’s play. He essentially received a nomination for not adapting his source material. So were voters consciously honoring Branagh’s righteous decision to not screw with the most celebrated writer in the English language, or were they just like, “Sure, I dig Hamlet,” and then checked the box without realizing no actual adaptation took place? Who knows! But it does suggest that Oscar voters may not always think about adaptation as a skillful craft so much as a refined taste for the most beloved source material.
Let’s run down the list of Barbie’s competitors. As far as both American Fiction and Poor Things are concerned, they’re relatively faithful adaptations of their source materials. Yes, the screenwriters undoubtedly added and subtracted various elements, and they certainly put their own spins on the dialogue, but the major structural and thematic ingredients are largely consistent with the original novels. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer script also tracks closely with its source material—as well as the historical record—with most of the distinguishing flourishes coming from Nolan’s obsession with distorting chronologies. (Also, the book definitely doesn’t have any mid-sex quoting of ancient apocalyptic prophecy.) And then there’s The Zone of Interest, which is on the opposite end of the spectrum—it has little in common with its source novel other than the Auschwitz setting and the inclusion of a Nazi commandant and his wife as main characters.
Regardless of the “level” of adaptation, these films all have one thing in common: They were adapted from individual books. I’m not saying that’s an easy task, and I’m not trying to diminish the fantastic scripts of four movies I really love. But comparatively speaking, those undertakings are less daunting than distilling a sprawling, several-decades-long mythology into a coherent two-hour story. The writers of American Fiction, Poor Things, and Oppenheimer each began with a blueprint that had a beginning, middle, and end. The writer of Zone of Interest only kind of had that luxury, and the writers of Barbie didn’t have it at all.
The Zone of Interest is an excellent film (full disclosure: I think it’s the best of 2023), but when comparing its world-building to that of Barbie, you have to consider where Barbie’s source mythology comes from. And when you think about the history of live-action movies based on toys, you quickly realize what a unicorn Barbie really is. We’ve gotten nearly a dozen Transformers and G.I. Joe movies (plus a bunch of direct-to-DVD American Girl doll movies), but regardless of how entertaining they might be to some, they have little to say in terms of artistic intent or narrative ambition. And that’s to say nothing of the onus on a Barbie movie to comment on the brand’s history of defining beauty standards and societal norms—in ways both empowering and harmful. Barbie the toy could famously be anything, but Barbie the movie needed to be something.
Fortunately, cowriters Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach were up to the challenge, and the story they concocted for Barbie created a bona fide phenomenon—one that will likely have a long-lasting impact on Hollywood moviemaking (and especially on movie marketing). “Game changer” is a disgustingly overused term, but Barbie was a true game changer for the film industry. And that doesn’t just start with the script; it very likely would have ended with the script, too. If the script wasn’t singular, the abstract, untethered concept of “Barbie” as a narrative would have failed as a movie. And as wonderful as Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling are as Barbie and Ken, respectively, those performances wouldn’t resonate without the dialogue Gerwig and Baumbach created for them. When you picture the greatness of those performances, you’re likely picturing them reading lines like: “Do you guys ever think about dying?” or “My job is just beach.”
Ultimately, Barbie is a film where virtually everything fires on all cylinders—the production design, the costumes, the music, the dance choreography, the large ensemble cast, the hair and makeup—but the work of those artists would all feel facile and soulless without a story that genuinely resonated. Gerwig and Baumbach created that story themselves, with no starting guide for where to go or how to get there. And all the more impressive is that the specific story they came up with had something important to say about our present moment. It’s one thing to weave pertinent messages into art-house films that are mostly consumed by the viewers within the movies’ own echo chambers. It’s another thing to put that messaging into mass entertainment and have audiences enthusiastically buy in. Generally speaking, the masses don’t want to receive lessons in misogyny. But Gerwig and Baumbach made those lessons palatable and a hell of a lot of fun, and they were so successful—and the result became so ubiquitous—that for a fleeting moment, it almost felt like the monoculture had returned. Give them the damn Oscar.
Daniel Joyaux is a writer based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. His work has appeared in Vanity Fair, Roger Ebert, Rotten Tomatoes, The Verge, and Cosmopolitan, among others. You can follow him on X @Thirdmanmovies and on Letterboxd at Djoyaux.