This Barbie is now getting ready for a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar campaign.
Despite Warner Bros.’ campaign for the IP summer box office juggernaut to land in this year’s Best Original Screenplay race, Greta Gerwig and her husband Noah Baumbach’s “Barbie” screenplay will now compete as adapted. Oscar nominations will be announced on Tuesday, January 23. Voting runs January 11 through 16 this year.
Variety first reported news of the category shake-up, with IndieWire confirmed independently and with the Academy. The Writers Branch executive committee — led by Academy governors Howard A. Rodman, Eric Roth, and Dana Stevens — ultimately deemed “Barbie” an adapted screenplay. Eligible voting members of the branch can now only vie for the film in that category. (IndieWire has learned that Roth recused himself from discussion around “Barbie,” as his adapted screenplay for “Killers of the Flower Moon” is in contention this year.)
“Barbie” was previously deemed an original script by the Writers Guild of America (WGA), whose own awards will take place on April 14 due to the since-ended strikes. That’s over a month after the Oscars, which take place March 10. By the time WGA voting closes on March 8, Oscars ballots will of course already be well in hand and decided. The BAFTAs, who roll out their own longlist of titles next week, also deemed “Barbie” an original script.
Gerwig and Baumbach wrote their screenplay based on the mythology of the popular Mattel doll, bringing their own 21st-century spin to the meta comedy starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling. Gerwig and Baumbach are also up for Best Screenplay, Motion Picture at the Golden Globes this coming Sunday, January 7, though that voting branch doesn’t distinguish between original or adapted. “Barbie” was the highest-grossing film domestically and worldwide at the box office in 2023.
As IndieWire’s Anne Thompson wrote back in December 2023, “The reason ‘Barbie’ is a contender for Original Screenplay is that there was no pre-existing Barbie character or story.” Baumbach told her at the time, “By design, dolls are empty vessels for us to put our own imaginative ideas and thoughts and feelings and fears. And these dolls are being played with by kids. So these dolls have a childlike quality to them. So it starts with the creation story. We were inventing it as we went.”
Academy writers and the WGA are not always in lockstep, and don’t have to be. Notably at the 2017 Oscars, Barry Jenkins’ “Moonlight” campaigned for original and was determined so by the WGA. The Oscars wound up slotting it as adapted — it was based on an unpublished play by Tarell Alvin McCraney — and it won in the category.
