Yesterday the Academy announced the nominees for the 2024 Oscars, and Barbie did very well for itself. Best Adapted Screenplay! Two original song nods! Ryan Gosling for Best Supporting Actor and America Ferrera for Best Supporting Actress! A Best Picture nomination! But alas, this has proven to not in fact be enough in an unhinged way.
Almost immediately since the dust settled on the nominations reveal, commentators have looked to the fact that both star Margot Robbie and director Greta Gerwig did not make their way into the Best Actress and Best Director categories. Many parallels were made between the movie’s commentary on patriarchy and the fact its male star saw recognition, of course, as well as the fact that Ferrera earned a Best Supporting Actress nod for her role in the movie—centered around her big climactic speech in the film about the duality of women’s place in society. All perfectly fine, so far. But suddenly, it seems, that has in the space of a day spun out into a commentary that the Academy has, somehow, destroyed film and feminism in equal measure with its nomination choices.
Think pieces have been forged in the fires of discourse hell, idle ribbing has turned into hysteria. At least the cast and crew involved with the film have been much more measured in their comments over the perceived slight. “I am extremely honored to be nominated by my colleagues alongside such remarkable artists in a year of so many great films. And I never thought I’d being saying this, but I’m also incredible honored and proud that it’s for portraying a plastic doll named Ken,” Ryan Gosling said in a statement released after his nomination. “But there is no Ken without Barbie, and there is no Barbie movie without Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie, the two people most responsible for this history-making, globally-celebrated film.”
“Greta has done just about everything that a director could do to deserve it,” Ferrera told Variety. “Creating this world, and taking something that didn’t have inherent value to most people and making it a global phenomenon. It feels disappointing to not see her on that list.”
These are all perfectly amicable things to say in statements about their own respective nominations, but the increasing idea that people attached to Barbie have to come out and address the purported snubbing is weird in context. Barbie took eight nominations at this year’s Oscars, and several of those nominations are in fact for both Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie.
Gerwig is credited alongside fellow screenwriter and partner Noah Baumbach for the Best Adapted Screenplay nomination, and Robbie is included in the Best Picture nomination, as that category is technically awarded to a movie’s producers. So it’s not like they have been overlooked entirely, just in these two specific categories most onlookers expected to see potential recognition in. And while some people have been quick to look to the Academy’s history of diverse nominees to take it to task, sexism doesn’t completely answer the reason for the snubs either, considering that Anatomy of a Fall’s Justine Triet is among the nominees for Best Director this year. Barbie is a blockbuster comedy, the kind of film that does not exactly make for typical Oscar fare, and its mainstream success overcame a lot to see it take in the nominations it already got (it’s worth noting, as the New York Times did so, that Best Director as a category is specifically voted for by the director’s branch of the Academy, rather than the general membership, which is not only a smaller pool of voters, but only made up of approximately 25% female members).
All that then, makes it absolutely bizarre that the latest person to wade into the commentary is neither Gerwig nor Robbie themselves, but former Secretary of State and Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
“While it can sting to win the box office but not take home the gold, your millions of fans love you. You’re both so much more than Kenough,” Clinton posted on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, in part this morning, along with the hashtag “HillaryBarbie.” Not to pull the “Kim there’s people that are dying” card too hard or anything, but surely there is enough going on in the American and international political sphere right now that Clinton has better things to offer commentary about, if at all? Does a movie with a lot of Oscar nominations not getting two specific nominations really warrant this level of weighing in? It’s giving Pokémon Go to the Polls, but even more absurd given everything we just laid out about Barbie’s very good run of nominations.
Barbie is already an overwhelming success, publicly and for the most part critically acclaimed, and made over a billion dollars last year. It’s not like it has gone unloved or underrated. Its nominations at the Oscars this year are still a part of history—Gerwig, in spite of missing out on a Best Director nod, is now the first filmmaker ever in the history of the Oscars to have had their first three solo-directed movies be nominated for Best Picture. Perhaps this simply should be kenough.
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