Attenzione Sneak: Let’s Talk About the Oscar Nominations

'Barbie' and 'Oppie' and no 'May December' oh my ...

Hung Up got a redesign! I’ve been working with my friends at Public-Library for the past few weeks on a new look. On the mood board was Sharon Stone in Casino and Solange’s stills for “When I Get Home.”

A few years ago, my friend Kyle Buchanan wrote about watching movies on a plane, via someone else’s seat monitor, or over someone’s shoulder. “Time and time again, I’ve tried not to be such a weird eavesdropper, but I just can’t help myself,” he wrote for Vulture in 2017. “When you can’t tell what the characters are saying in someone else’s movie, it creates a curiosity gap that’s so much more enticing than simply firing up that movie to watch it yourself.” I was on a five hour flight the other day without wifi, and only Midnights and a Drake album downloaded on my phone. I watched Barbie with (via?) the woman in 23F, one row in front of me.

I was sort of transfixed by it. So much of Barbie has become exhausting to me: the loving of Barbie, the hating of Barbie, the pink, the press tour, the America Ferrera monologue, the how much is this movie really about Ken … I could go on. But there, in the sky somewhere between Atlanta and Raliegh, I could only see a big swing that worked more often than it didn’t. This is a movie about talking dolls who live in Barbieland and a Kensurection! It looks and feels like a big Technicolor musical. There is so much optimistic weirdness to Barbie, as a character, that Margot Robbie really commits to. And in the middle there’s a car commercial and a scene that looks like an ad for antidepressants. Barbie isn’t perfect, but watching it on that flight felt like a magic trick. The “I can’t believe they got away with this!” of it all was enthralling.

This One Line From Barbie Plays on a Loop in My Head

Barbie was the headline snub Tuesday morning, when the Oscar nominations were announced. Margot Robbie was shut out of Best Actress (but was nominated as a producer of Barbie), and Greta Gerwig was left off of the Best Director list, only nominated for co-writing the script. (But “I’m Just Ken” and America Ferrera get in? Be so serious right now…) When the nominations were read, Martin Scorsese became the most nominated living director — 10! Gagged them a bit! — and there are more black acting nominees than I can recall in recent memory.

But enough about Barbie. I don’t care for Past Lives as much as many of you did — sorry, they needed to kiss — so its Best Picture nomination is an overperformance. Nyad! Nyad! Nyad! I love Annette Bening but my God — what a drag! Nyad is certainly a movie … that exists in the endless data dump of Netflix. I hope the “Lily Gladstone just laid in bed in Killers of the Flower Moon” and the “why didn’t Anna Paquin have any lines in The Irishman” crowds have an amazing time continuing to never understand anything. Not everything has to be big or grueling or garish; you can feel the pain, and paranoia, through every moment of that Gladstone performance, and not once did she feel slight.