It’s been a strange week to be in the online movie space. On Tuesday, Oscar nominations were announced and were even more predictable and boring than usual. After several interesting years of Oscar races—2016 (Moonlight) through 2021 (CODA)—this year figures to be a landslide for Oppenheimer as last year was a landslide for Everything Everywhere All at Once. There are still a couple competitive races—Best Actor, Best Actress, Adapted Screenplay—but a lot of them seem fairly locked in at this point.
Perhaps this is why this year’s “snub” discourse got so heated.
Part of me thinks that the much-discussed snubs this past week for Barbie—Greta Gerwig for Best Director and Margot Robbie for Best Actress—will fade in time. But another part thinks that, with Oppenheimer likely to win many awards, and audiences likely to remember the “Barbenheimer” link, these are snubs that will sting for a long time.
As such, I think it’s worth talking about what happened this week regarding Barbie’s lack of nominations, the nominations it got, and, most importantly, the discourse on a number of different sides, all of which are misguided to one extent or another. It’s been an angry and toxic week. Let’s try to make sense of it.
Barbie got 8 Oscar nominations: Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor (Ryan Gosling), Best Supporting Actress (America Ferrera), Best Adapted Screenplay (Gerwig and Noah Baumbach), Best Costume Design, Best Production Design, and Best Original Song twice (“I’m Just Ken” and “What Was I Made For?”).
8 nominations is solid, but it’s a lot less than people expected given how big the cultural imprint of Barbie was. As noted above, there is anger around the snubs of Gerwig for Best Director and Robbie for Best Actress, with a lesser measure of anger about not including “Dance the Night” in the Best Song race.
It’s worth noting that Gerwig and Robbie had essentially no chance of winning Best Director and Best Actor awards respectively. I say this because sometimes snubs happen to would-be-nominees that are seen as frontrunners, such as Eighth Grade for Best Original Screenplay and Won’t You Be My Neighbor? for Best Documentary, both from 2018 (the year the academy got things most wrong, but that’s a rant for another day).
People’s attitudes toward Barbie seem to fall in four camps:
- Intense loathing toward the movie rooted in misogyny
- A general sense that “it’s fine” but not an “Oscar movie” whatever that means
- Respect for the accomplishment of Barbie, and enjoyment of the film, while admitting it has shortcomings and issues
- People who really genuinely love Barbie
Many of the reactions I’ve seen this week are what you expect, like people who have spent a year hating Barbie without a particularly good reason still hate Barbie without a particularly good reason. But I think it’s worth teasing out the sentiment from people that land somewhere in one of the other camps, a lot of whom have said well-meaning and unhelpful things this week.
First is the sentiment that snubs for Robbie and Gerwig, coupled with a nomination for Gosling, is patriarchy in action and deeply ironic given the themes of Barbie. I think this is basically correct though it forgets that Barbie itself has this problem. Ken has all the best lines, all the most comedic moments. Robbie’s character, Stereotypical Barbie, doesn’t allow Robbie a lot of space to make the character her own, which is kind of the point. The film is very much about how patriarchy forces women into boxes. That’s the intentional part. The probably unintentional part is that by making Ken more interesting than Barbie, the film somewhat undermines its own message. Still, especially the lack of Gerwig nomination does seem to show the patriarchy in full working order.
There was reaction to this sentiment, too. Some offered up the take that, because Barbie got 8 Oscar nominations, you can’t argue that patriarchy is working against it. I think this is off-base, and another take helps make this point. That other take is the idea that Justine Triet (Anatomy of a Fall) took the spot that was likely to go to Gerwig.
This take proves how patriarchy is working in the discourse. If there is a belief that the academy was only going to nominate one woman for Best Director, then that is evidence of patriarchy. Similarly, if you hold that Martin Scorsese had to be nominated because he’s Scorsese (and because for some reason that I can’t grasp, some people think Killers of the Flower Moon was actually good), that’s also the mindset of patriarchy. The suggestion that many have voiced that it would Gerwig OR Triet OR Celine Song (Past Lives) speaks to how easily we internalize the “required” status quo when discussing Oscars.
To summarize: I think there’s legitimacy to blaming patriarchy for Barbie’s snubs. This is a year that saw a record-breaking three women directed films nominated for Best Picture (this is a depressing record). There’s not a particularly good reason why only one such woman is represented in the Best Director race and, importantly, our willingness to explain this away speaks to the hold that patriarchy has our collective thinking about the Oscars.
The next group of reactions fall into the category of people that want to talk about other things. There are people who want to talk about how Greta Lee and Celine Song were snubbed from Past Lives, and I think this is valid. While it’s certainly true that they were longer shots given Oscar norms, they had a reasonable chance of landing nominations for Past Lives. Such a line of thinking almost gets at the academy’s well-documented white bias.
Other people wanted to talk about Lily Gladstone and their historic nomination for Best Actress. I’ve seen one such articulation of this sentiment more than any others, and it’s worth looking at it in full.
There’s a lot going on here. First calling Gladstone a “woman” paints an overly simplistic picture. Gladstone uses she and they pronouns as a way of “decolonizing gender for myself.” Gladstone might or might not want to be referred to as a woman but almost certainly doesn’t want to be flattened how this quote flattens them. Second, Gladstone will not “almost certainly” win Best Actress. Gold Derby, the leading source for Oscar odds, has her odds slightly behind Emma Stone’s at the moment. Stone is 17/5 and Gladstone is 18/5. That’s a dead heat. I agree with this, as it seems Stone has pulled ahead. Suggesting Gladstone will “almost certainly” win betrays a profound ignorance of the actual state of the Oscar race.
But then there’s the end of this quote bringing things back to “feminism.” Stated here is the idea that people are taking Robbie’s snub as a loss for feminism (in a category exclusive to “women,” I’m not sure how this is possible, but I digress). The implication being that Gladstone’s nomination is a win for feminism as they would be the first Native American to win Best Actress. I don’t think this is true. While it’s certainly a historic accomplishment for a Native American person to be nominated for a lead actor award, it’s only a “win” for feminism if it alters the power structures in play and makes it easier for other women and/or queer folks to come along and follow instead. Given that Gladstone had another movie last year—Fancy Dance—which hasn’t even been released due to lack of distribution, Gladstone’s nomination does not signal systemic change. It’s one strong performance from a Native American actor from a movie that was still incredibly white and incredibly willing to flatten and reduce the experience of its Native characters.
I end with this point, because this is what I find so fascinating about the Barbie discourse this week. As I’ve said before, Barbie is NOT a film about feminism; it’s a film about patriarchy. It’s about systemic power structures that harm and hamper women. It’s not a film about nuanced woman-ness or how female solidarity can undermine said power structures. It’s not a particularly intersectional movie either, not really addressing racial or gender dynamics that intersect with woman-ness. If you want a movie about feminism of this kind, go watch Bottoms.
But in the discourse this week, we can see that Barbie has largely been co-opted as feminist even though it really isn’t. From Hilary Clinton to the quote addressed above, a lot of people want to fit Barbie into whatever feminist narrative they have. Barbie is more interested at gesturing to power structures in place while not dismantling them. Barbie doesn’t really say the grand things some people want it to say. It largely makes surface-level observations while staying very white and very straight and cis. That’s fine, but it means that a lot of the discussion this week kind of circled something substantial without landing on it.
Barbie is a solid movie and more interesting than typical blockbuster fare. Gerwig did a great job executing her vision and probably should have been nominated for Best Director (she would have become the first woman nominated for the third time). Robbie also did a great job being exactly what the movie needed her to be. She certainly doesn’t get to show the range she showed in Babylon, or have as much fun as she had there either, but she pulled off an impressive accomplishment amidst a supporting cast of characters likely to outshine her (and, yup, they did). I would have liked to see her nominated even if just to show that the academy can recognize acting that falls outside the “Oscar norm.”
There were a LOT of snubs this year. The Iron Claw received no nominations and May December received only one. Priscilla was also shut out, even for Best Actress, which helps illustrate that A24 didn’t have the means to campaign for all their movies that deserved accolades this year. That was my big takeaway from the nominations: how clearly this year’s crop exposed the corrupt game that is courting Oscar voters.
But everyone else decided to talk about Barbie, so I wrote about that instead. With all that said, I really do hope Gerwig and Baumbach take home the award for Adapted Screenplay. They’re both long overdue and Barbie really does deserve to win more than just Best Song.
