Diablo Cody – Celebrity About

Ten years ago, Diablo Cody was attached to the first big attempt to turn Barbie into a movie. Diablo, who won an Oscar for her Juno screenplay, was tasked with making a feminist Barbie movie with Amy Schumer as the lead, and something happens where Barbie is kicked out of BarbieWorld. The project died, partly because of Diablo (she couldn’t figure out how to write it) and partly because of Amy (she sucks). Time passed and Margot Robbie went to Mattel and asked if she could try to put something together. She pitched her production company to produce, and she hired Greta Gerwig to write the screenplay (Greta would rope in her partner Noah Baumbach as co-writer). The rest is history – they made a wonderfully appealing movie, Barbie has made over $1.4 billion and Gerwig and Robbie were just snubbed for acting and directing Oscar nominations. People Mag recently chatted with Diablo about her thoughts on Barbie and the Oscar snubs.

Diablo Cody is sharing her point of view on those Barbie Oscar nominations. The writer, who won the Best Original Screenplay Academy Award back in 2008 for Juno, previously took a stab at writing a Barbie film that never came to fruition. The version that did make a splash in theaters last year, directed and co-written by Greta Gerwig, this week earned eight Oscar nominations, including for Best Picture. Still, Gerwig being left out of the Best Director category and Margot Robbie’s absence in the Best Actress race were considered snubs by fans.

“Here’s what I’m going to say. Obviously, of course I think Greta deserved a nomination and so did Margot,” Cody, 45, tells PEOPLE. “But they made a billion dollars on that movie, okay? I would trade my Oscar for a billion-dollar movie right now, if I could flip a switch! Sorry if that’s disrespectful to the Academy.”

“They made a billion dollars and they got eight nominations across the board,” Cody says. “Margot got nominated as a producer, which I think, knowing what she has been trying to do in her career, I feel like that must’ve been incredibly satisfying for her. And Greta created a phenomenon.”

“I’m telling you, that was a tough project,” says Cody, whose next film is the teen horror-romance Lisa Frankenstein. “Having worked on [a Barbie project] made me respect it all the more, because that is a very challenging property to take and turn into something real. And they did it.”

“So you could call it a snub, but I think that what they achieved is probably bigger than those individual nominations,” she adds.

[From People]

I think all of this is true and Diablo is in a unique position to speak about how difficult it really was to turn “a doll” into a billion-dollar movie. Diablo tried and she couldn’t work it out, and she’s pointing out how f–king difficult it was for Gerwig and Robbie to do what they did. That’s what bugs me the most about the Oscar snubs – the Oscar voters failed to recognize the difficulty and the huge swing Robbie and Gerwig took here. They didn’t value the creativity, they didn’t value how hard it was to thread that needle and they certainly didn’t value a pop culture phenomenon which appealed to girls and women. As for Diablo saying she’d rather have a billion-dollar movie than an Oscar… maybe that’s true too. But why not both? Why does it have to be either/or?

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.

: 174869, Diablo Cody at the Premiere Of Focus Features’ ‘Tully’ at Regal LA Live Stadium 14. Los Angeles, California – Wednesday April 18, 2018. Photograph: © Joe Sutter, PacificCoastNews. Los Angeles Office (PCN): 1 310.822.0419 UK Office (Avalon): 44 (0) 20 7421 6000,Image: 514999088, License: Rights-managed, Restrictions: WORLD RIGHTS – DIRECT SALES ONLY- Fee Payable Upon Reproduction – For queries contact Avalon.red – [email protected] London: 44 (0) 20 7421 6000 Los Angeles: 1 (310) 822 0419 Berlin: 49 (0) 30 76 212 251, Model Release: no, Credit line: Joe Sutter, PacificCoastNews / Avalon

: Diablo Cody
at the BabyQuest “Let’s Make A Baby” Fundraiser Gala, Private Estate, Toluca Lake, CA 05-19-16,Image: 530847212, License: Rights-managed, Restrictions: WORLD RIGHTS – Fee Payable Upon Reproduction – For queries contact Photoshot – [email protected] London: 44 (0) 20 7421 6000 Los Angeles: 1 (310) 822 0419 Berlin: 49 (0) 30 76 212 251, Model Release: no, Credit line: Martin Sloan / Avalon

: Margot Robbie photographed attending the European premiere of Barbie at Cineworld Leicester Square in London, UK on 12 July 2023.,Image: 788738538, License: Rights-managed, Restrictions: , Model Release: no, Credit line: Julie Edwards / Avalon

: Ryan Gosling and Margot Robbie at the Barbie European Premiere at Cineworld in Leicester Square, London, United Kingdom on 12 July 2023.,Image: 788742881, License: Rights-managed, Restrictions: , Model Release: no, Credit line: Cat Morley / Avalon

: Greta Gerwig at the Barbie European Premiere at Cineworld in Leicester Square, London, United Kingdom on 12 July 2023.,Image: 788749881, License: Rights-managed, Restrictions: , Model Release: no, Credit line: Cat Morley / Avalon

The upcoming Barbie movie is the first movie that I’ve been excited about all year. (And Oppenheimer, but mostly because it’s always a pleasure to see Cillian Murphy looking gorgeously miserable in his special way). It’s been a long time coming, this movie–remember back in 2014, Amy Schumer was attached to the project? There was also a time when screenwriter Diablo Cody was involved. She wrote the screenplay for Juno and Jennifer’s Body, the former earning her an Oscar. People panned Jennifer’s Body initially but it’s become something of a cult classic now. But her attempt to write a script for the Barbie movie didn’t go well–she didn’t even turn in a draft. Diablo talked to GQ about the upcoming Barbie movie, and where she thinks it went wrong for her. A big factor is the change in the cultural conversation about hyper-femininity and embracing “bimbo culture.”

The bimbo is now a valid feminist archetype (on TikTok): “I think I know why I shit the bed,” she tells GQ over the phone from Los Angeles. “When I was first hired for this, I don’t think the culture had not embraced the femme or the bimbo as valid feminist archetypes yet. If you look up ‘Barbie’ on TikTok you’ll find this wonderful subculture that celebrates the feminine, but in 2014, taking this skinny blonde white doll and making her into a heroine was a tall order.”

The Amy Schumer Barbie would have been an ‘anti-Barbie’: The plan had been to package Cody’s affectionate and idiosyncratic take on the character with an unconventional leading actress—specifically Amy Schumer, whose crass, confessional work as a stand-up and sketch comic gave her a certain counterculture credibility. It was, in theory, a terrific idea, but Cody recalls that the concept was ultimately less liberating than it seemed. “That idea of an anti-Barbie made a lot of sense given the feminist rhetoric of ten years ago,” says Cody. “I didn’t really have the freedom then to write something that was faithful to the iconography; they wanted a girl-boss feminist twist on Barbie, and I couldn’t figure it out because that’s not what Barbie is.”

It was hard to walk a fine line between satire and positive branding: Cody notes that part of the problem was that The Lego Movie made for a daunting template, having managed so voraciously to have its cake and eat it too in terms of being both a satire and an act of brand extension. “I heard endless references to The Lego Movie in development,” she says, “and it created a problem for me because they had done it so well. Any time I came up with something meta, it was too much like what they had done. It was a roadblock for me, but now enough time has passed that they can just cast [The Lego Movie antagonist] Will Ferrell as the antagonist in a real-life Barbie movie and nobody cares.”

[From GQ]

Barbie is one of those cultural artifacts with so many possibly meanings–often contradictory meanings. To the children who play with them, Barbie dolls represent creativity and self-expression and imagination. Barbie has had almost every job, I think–even entomologist. And yet for all of the possibilities of Barbie–for all her jobs and outfits and make-believe story lines–she also continues to reinforce a narrow definition of beauty. So I see why Diablo got stuck. It’s hard to make that character into a “feminist girl-boss” and I’m glad they abandoned that approach altogether. And I wonder if Diablo’s style of dialogue would have worked. It has its own flaws, but I kind of like aspects of “bimbo culture”. So many of the interests that are coded as feminine–makeup, beauty, fashion, etc–are seldom taken as seriously in our culture as masculine-coded interests like sports and cars and things like that. I think that’s why so many people like Barbie, because she celebrates those “girlie” interests without a trace of irony.

Embed from Getty Images