Dame Helen Mirren, the legendary British actress with an Oscar win for 2007’s “The Queen” as well as three other nominations plus several Emmys, Golden Globes, a Tony Award, and more on her shelf, wants the public to cool down a little bit with their awards-mania. Especially the anger about the so-called “Barbie” snubs at this year’s Academy Awards, with its star Margot Robbie not getting a nomination for Best Actress or its director, Greta Gerwig, only receiving a nomination as co-screenwriter with her husband, Noah Baumbach.
“You can’t get upset about things like that, honestly,” Mirren, whose voice is deployed in the film as the narrator, told Entertainment Tonight. “What is fantastic is that ‘Barbie’ was the highest-grossing film that Warner Bros. has ever had in their lives and do you remember who won best film of the year before last?”
While we at Gold Derby (and you reading) are not exactly the target audience for this comment – the answer, of course, is “CODA,” which defeated “The Power of the Dog” at the 2022 Oscars, the “year before last” – it’s a point well taken. Walk outside your home and ask the next 10 people you see what won the Oscar two years ago and it’s unlikely a single person will remember.
Mirren continued, alluding to the apples and oranges notion of awards for movies as different as “Barbie” is to some of the other nominees. “I mean, of course, I would have loved to have seen Greta get a nomination, and I think she should win…. It’s so difficult, it’s not a running race, you know, you can’t — Christopher Nolan’s work on ‘Oppenheimer’ was spectacular, extraordinary. But for me, Greta’s work was so out there, it was so brave, it was something we’d never seen before. I just love the fact that the audience responded the way they did.”
Both Robbie (who is nominated for the Best Picture prize as a producer) and Gerwig have been pretty demure about their perceived snubs. Best Supporting Actor nominee Ryan Gosling, however, has done his duty as White Knight Ken, issuing a statement calling out how it was unfair that his colleagues got dissed by the nominating committees. He also joked about it with Jimmy Kimmel in a promo for the upcoming telecast, which suggests we’ll see more about this topic on March 10.
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