Down with "Did 'Wicked' direct itself?"

Against today's most tiresome Oscars talking point.

Just about every year, the Oscar nominations are announced, and there’s some non-alignment between the Best Picture and Best Director categories. This happened fairly often, back when there were five Best Picture nominations. And now that there are ten, there are at least five director “snubs,” by definition, every year.

Every year that this happens, the reaction is the same, usually from aggrieved fans of that movie: “Did [X movie whose director wasn’t nominated"] Direct Itself?” This has happened most notably with Greta Gerwig, for both Little Women in 2019 and Barbie in 2023.

The first-ever use of the formulation appears to date back to 1992, when Billy Crystal, hosting the Oscars, made light of Barbra Streisand’s lack of a Best Director nomination for The Prince of Tides: “Seven nominations on the shelf/did this film direct itself?” (The venerable songwriter Marc Shaiman takes credit for writing the line):

Years later, at the 1998 Oscars, Crystal made a similar joke about how The Invisible Man directed As Good as It Gets, as that film got a Best Picture nomination but director James L. Brooks didn’t get a director nod.