With a terrible inevitability, this is set to be the Enheimer Oscars. The Barb half has faded almost entirely from the conversation, and now even the scandal of its snubs seems to be a non-talking point. Seriousness and maleness and nuclear bombs make for plausible Oscar prizes, it seems, not female-centred comedy. Greta Gerwig’s monumental box office achievement with her sprightly, spectacular Barbie was the talk of the town last summer as part of the #Barbenheimer double-header. It launched a zillion op-ed pieces about whether Margot Robbie’s witty blond heroine was feminism’s hero or villain (a puzzle that the film didn’t entirely solve) and sold a zillion tickets, thus solving – or anyway deferring – the cinema industry’s pressing financial problems.
But, right or wrong, the Academy has pretty much turned its nose up at the zany DayGlo surreality of Barbie. Perhaps the horror of the daily news has soured everyone’s appetite for comedy. Oppenheimer, with its massive, complex, tragic story of J Robert Oppenheimer, is all set to capture the zeitgeist.
