The one thing Greta Gerwig hates being called: “That part was difficult”
Greta Gerwig has a rare and enviable track record as a director. She’s only made three films so far, all of which have been critically acclaimed and Oscar-nominated. Lady Bird, a low-key but sneakily profound coming-of-age movie starring Saoirse Ronan, was nominated for five Oscars. Little Women, a heartfelt and creative take on Louisa May Alcott’s beloved novel, was nominated for six Oscars and won for ‘Best Costume Design’. And Barbie, the record-breaking smash that almost no one thought was a good idea, was nominated for a whopping eight Oscars and won for ‘Best Original Song’.
You’d think that a filmmaker who has consistently earned rave reviews and whose films have been showered with Oscar nominations would have a few ‘Best Director’ Academy Award nods under her belt, but somehow, Gerwig has been repeatedly passed over for this distinction. She’s only been nominated for the category once, for Lady Bird, and has had to settle for screenplay nominations the rest of the time.
There is no excuse for the Academy snubbing her for Barbie. It was a tonally challenging musical with an enormous cast and a huge budget that still managed to do a victory lap with critics and make more than a billion dollars at the box office. Gerwig was magnanimous about her exclusion from the race, downplaying the egregious oversight and focusing on the nominations of her collaborators instead. However, it’s hard not to see it as a pattern that has followed her throughout her career.
Gerwig began as an actor and writer, finding a creative kindred spirit in director Noah Baumbach, who she would later marry. They co-wrote the indie movies Frances Ha and Mistress America, but because he was the director and she was the star playing guileless, immature 20-somethings, her contributions to the movies were frequently downplayed. Rather than being seen as a collaborator, she was dismissed as a mere inspiration.
“I did not love being called a muse,” Gerwig told Vulture in 2017, around the time Lady Bird was released. “I didn’t want to be strident about it or say, ‘Hey, give me my due,’ but I did feel like I wasn’t a bystander. It was half-mine, and so that part was difficult. Also, I knew secretly that I was engaged with this longer project and wanted to be a writer and director in my own right, so I felt like the muse business, or whatever it was, was a position that I didn’t identify with in my heart.”
Part of the issue, she acknowledged, was that the genre of films they were making was mumblecore, a somewhat derogatory name for low-budget, meandering movies that focus on characters who are usually overgrown children in adult bodies. Lynn Shelton, Joe Swanberg, and Jay and Mark Duplass spearheaded the movement.
Barbie is about as far away from mumblecore as possible, and luckily, people rarely identify Gerwig as Baumbach’s ‘muse’ anymore. It is frustrating that she still hasn’t earned the praise she deserves as a director, but as her filmography expands, that will almost certainly change.
