It was around the time when people were blaming eugenics on the Barbie Oscar snubs that I feared we may have lost the plot.
Every year Oscar nominations happen, and every year voters make bad choices. My personality is 70 percent comprised of complaining about deserving acting nominations that didn’t happen. It’s called being homosexual.
Theoretically, then, I would be compassionate to the litany of takes in response to Greta Gerwig not being nominated for Best Director for her work on Barbie, and Margot Robbie not making it into the Best Actress race. But the conversation has escalated from the warranted “oh darn” to a level of think-piece/bad-tweet nuclear warfare that even I, a person who brings up Jennifer Lopez being shut out for Hustlers daily and has a voodoo doll of June Squibb on behalf of Oprah’s snubbed The Butler performance, am concerned.
Here’s how Oscar nomination morning shook down: In the year that Barbenheimer basically saved cinemas and reignited mainstream interest in movies again, Oppenheimer got 13 Academy Award nominations and Barbie got eight. Those are both massive tallies reflecting the impact and the craft of those respective industry-saving films. But if you have been on social media the last few days, you would have thought that the Academy gave Oppenheimer a bouquet of roses and left a flaming brown bag of poo at Barbie director Greta Gerwig’s door.
What happened is complicated to talk about, which is not how we do things here in reactionary America. That explains how we got to Hillary Clinton equating Greta and Margot not getting Oscar nods to her losing the 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump. (A thing my brain refuses to believe really happened.)
Barbie got several major Oscar nods, including Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Supporting Actor for Ryan Gosling, and Best Supporting Actress, a surprise nod, for America Ferrera. It did not receive a Best Director nod for Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie missed out in the incredibly (gloriously) competitive Best Actress lineup.
I found that disappointing. The internet found it to be a war crime.
Listen, I track award season like it’s my job… because it is my job. There are things that I was delusionally hoping for, and got bummed when they didn’t happen: This year, that was Andrew Scott for All of Us Strangers and Rachel McAdams for Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. But when you look at the award season trends, you get a sense for what’s likely. And it almost never has to do with what’s deserving. Hence Andy and Rach not being nominees right now.
Oscar nominations are almost never reflective of what were the objectively best films and performances of the year. (Though, as an aside, I have to say: While it is not my personal Top 10, this is the finest Best Picture lineup there’s been since I’ve started covering this stuff.)
There’s campaigning, politics, narratives, messaging, and so much money that it would depress you that take over when it comes to determining Academy Award nominations. Knowing that is why I’m personally bummed—and actually a bit offended—by the Barbie “snubs.”
A snub is not a disappointment. You have to actually argue that one nominee is there that doesn’t deserve to be and the other option should be there instead. I would have liked Gerwig to get into Best Director, but I also wouldn’t necessarily remove anyone from the existing list. In Best Actress, I would easily take Annette Bening out of the list, but would I put Robbie in her place, or would I rather put Greta Lee for Past Lives, Fantasia Barrino for The Color Purple, or Teyana Taylor for A Thousand and One?
So let’s take the snub rhetoric out of it, and think about the politics of it all. This is a film that was a cultural moment, of the kind that, honestly, rivals Titanic—at least by today’s standards. It wasn’t just popular, it was also quite good. There are legitimate debates to how good, but its inarguable quality and the significance it had in society and the industry merit, according to the aforementioned politics of all, major awards nominations. When it comes to the business of awards, a directing and an acting nomination is what happens when you make a movie like this.
That’s the reason to be pissed. Gerwig and Robbie didn’t miss out because voters were being responsible to the task of choosing the “best”—there are a slew of other nominations that would not have happened if that was the case. They missed out because the Academy was making some sort of gross statement. The Academy makes gross statements like this all the time: Blockbusters, comedies, and films centering women aren’t to be taken seriously. But to have the seismic impact that Barbie had and for the voters to thwart their usual nomination pattern and adhere to those beliefs is jarring. It’s offensive. I’m annoyed!
I get being reactionary about the nominations for that reason. But the level to which it’s seemed to break everyone’s brains is astounding.
Major news outlets ran deranged columns, like this one arguing that the academy would have rewarded Barbie if only she had been portrayed as a sex worker. A common opinion I came across on social media was that nominating the performer playing Ken for an Oscar but not the one playing Barbie essentially confirms the thesis of the movie. Again, it must be said, HILLARY CLINTON made a statement about it, like this was a matter of concern about the state of our democracy. J. Lo did not interpolate “Let’s Get Loud” into “This Your Land Is Your Land” at the inauguration just for this to happen.
I don’t want to discredit being peeved about Oscar nominations, because if that wasn’t valued behavior then what would my personality and/or sexuality mean anymore? But the discourse in this arena has become ludicrous.
It might be surprising to learn, if you’ve only heard about the Oscar nods via these rants, that Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie are actually nominated for Academy Awards this year for Barbie. Gerwig is nominated in Best Adapted Screenplay and for Best Picture, where Robbie is also nominated.
These are huge nominations rewarding the Herculean, almost impossible feat of creating a film like Barbie. Both Gerwig and Robbie spoke proudly about the producing aspects of the film and the challenges they surmounted to create the product that we saw. Robbie has been producing films for years under her Lucky Chap banner, and this is her first Best Picture nomination. Why are we diminishing the achievement of those mentions?
And the whole “sexist” argument: While it has merits in terms of the Academy as an institution, it’s a bit belittling in this case, where a film has eight nominations, including Best Picture. It’s even more ludicrous and, frankly, dismissive when America Ferrera scored her first acting nomination in Best Supporting Actress. She likely won that nod because of her performance of a monologue about feminism that became a lighting rod at the water cooler. In order to make these arguments about the misogynistic snubs, people are pretending that Ferrera and her recognition doesn’t exist.
So, yeah, be angry about the Barbie snubs. Getting fired up about these things is worthwhile discourse—and, honestly, is what gets people invested in things like the Academy Awards in the first place. I will never forget the girls at school weeping during recess in fifth grade when they found out Leonardo DiCaprio was snubbed for Titanic. There honestly hasn’t been a movie as big as Barbie that’s also been tipped for awards since social media has been around, which explains a bit why the normies are all up in arms on your timeline this year.
That’s totally fair. But also, maybe, get some context and… calm down.
