A Penn screenwriting professor on the Oscars’ screenplay categories and the year of ‘Barbenheimer’

The 96th Academy Awards will take place on March 10 and cap a year of bounce-back from a pandemic-era box office slump and the summer sensation of “Barbenheimer”—a phenomenon so widely spread it earned its own Wikipedia entry.

Kathy DeMarco Van Cleve, a senior lecturer in Cinema & Media Studies who teaches Screenwriting and Advanced Screenwriting, in talking about the year of film, led by emphasizing the lifeline that “Barbie,” in particular, offered to the industry.

“‘Barbie’ was, obviously, a phenomenon and was a welcome commercial phenomenon not just for Warner Bros., but for the entire movie business that had been decimated by COVID, then the strikes, and then bad press,” observes Van Cleve. “‘Barbie’ and ‘Oppenheimer,’ definitely ‘Barbie,’ from a writer’s perspective, was amazing. [‘Barbie’ screenplay writers] Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig went for it.”

“‘Barbie,’” she quips, may not be “substantively good in the way that some innovation in water conservation would be,” but went a long way toward creating a large-scale cultural conversation that was also entertaining. And that, she says, “is a home run to me.”

Moreover, as a nominee in the Adapted Screenplay category at the Oscars, it earned its spot as a film that could have been much less creative and, frankly, because of its subject matter, less good.

“If we’re going to mine dolls and have a Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head movie or something like that coming up, I hope those writers are equally [empowered] to make what is an absurd subject relevant and new,” Van Cleve explains. “That made us want to watch.”

Whether the film’s massive success—it earned $1.4 billion, as of September—will help its chances with voters is a toss-up. Typically, she says, screenplay categories serve as an opportunity for Academy voters to reward films that are perceived as destined to fail in major categories like Best Picture. The more indie-auteur voting crowd, she suspects, will likely turn up their nose at “Barbie” precisely because of its commercial success, and may be more likely to vote for a film like “American Fiction.” (Which she says she would also likely vote for.)

For the Original Screenplay category, Van Cleve is placing a bet on “Anatomy of a Fall”—“It’s really, really good”—but, given the choice, would vote for “Past Lives,” a romantic film written and directed by Celine Song and based on her own experiences of a doomed childhood love with someone from her upbringing in South Korea.

“For me, I think it’s so hard to write about your personal life, and especially romances that don’t work,” Van Cleve says. “It’s so easy to be trite.”

It helps the case of “Past Lives,” she says, that it exists during a time when so few romance movies manage to move beyond a flood of Netflix films that “don’t have any heart to them.”

“I’m older than everybody in ‘Past Lives’ and I’ve never been to Korea, but I was still like ‘I’ve been there!’” she says. “That, to me, is the magic of writing.”

Broadly, she concludes, it’s a strong year of films for the Oscars, with nary a bad film in the bunch—though she wouldn’t dole out any awards to Philly darling Bradley Cooper’s “Maestro.”

“I liked ‘Maestro,’ but … I think that screenplay is more visual than story-based,” she says. “You leave the theater and I feel like I don’t know who Leonard Bernstein was. It was a pastiche.”

It was a beautiful film full of captivating shots, she notes, but the screenplay let the rest of the film down.

“Honestly, if you have Kathy DeMarco Van Cleve talking about shots, you know the screenplay is not good, because I don’t care about shots—I never do,” she laughs.

Looking ahead, Van Cleve is optimistic about the state of the film business, despite a string of negative headlines about consolidation and firings, and a box office that still lags behind pre-pandemic returns.

“In the short-term, I’m not as dismal about the movie business as maybe some of my peers are,” she says. “I prefer to think of it as a correction to too many films that have been released.”

The net result, she predicts, will be that fewer films will get made, but more people will want to watch them. And maybe, just maybe, more “Barbenheimer” moments will follow.