Ryan Gosling, Margot Robbie and Greta Gerwig on the set of the movie “Barbie” Photo: Jaap Buitendijk/Warner Bros. Pictures via AP
Barely six months ago, Barbie was hailed as the savior of popular cinema, but this week the hilarious pink satire kept the Oscars ablaze. The Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie film is currently up for eight Oscars at this year's ceremony, including best picture, but Gerwig and Robbie themselves are notably not among the directing and acting nominees.
Aside from the fury on Twitter, where users adore Barbie (and, of course, hate him), the lack of recognition for the two women at the helm of this billion-dollar box office feminist blockbuster has become a source of great consternation in Hollywood. Speaking on the Today program on Thursday, Succession star Sarah Snook said she was “disappointed” that her “fellow Aussie” Robbie was not shortlisted over Ryan Gosling and America Ferrara, who were nominated. in the supporting actor and actress categories for their roles as Ken and Barbie fan Gloria expressed dismay at the absence of their co-stars.
“Without Barbie, there is no Ken,” Gosling even said in his statement, and one could imagine him saying these words while looking wistfully at the beach of Barbieland, his pastel Hawaiian shirt flapping plaintively in the wind.< /p> 
Once upon a time this would hardly have been considered hype, but at this point it is quite an achievement. Even after a decade of solemnly promising to “do better” on representation, the Academy managed to become embroiled in a sexism scandal just hours after announcing its latest nominations. And that's the one outcome they've been trying to avoid for the last ten years: Following the #OscarsSoWhite outcry over the 2015 all-Caucasian cast of acting nominees, the awards body launched a massive diversity campaign, nearly doubling its membership from 6,000 to 11,000 in an attempt to correct any entrenched racial and sexual distortions.
As of 2022, 81 percent of its members still “identify as white”—so you can bet there's more than there really is—while the ratio of men to women was roughly two to one, so parity is on both fronts compared to the broader US population is still a long way off. Even so, it's a marked change from an electorate that was 94 percent white and 77 percent male 10 years ago—though judging by the alarm over two high-profile Barbie snubs, old prejudices apparently die hard.
You must be a leading lady, but you cannot be nominated for Best Actress. You have to be a strong female director, but you can't be nominated for best director. You must have a very popular dance song, but you cannot be nominated for Best Original Song. pic.twitter.com/yhlpS4AdTv
— Adam (@adamgreattweet) January 23, 2024
Or are they? It would be hard to argue with the Academy going against Barbie as a whole, considering it was the fourth most nominated film of the year. (This is especially impressive given that it's essentially a comedy, which has never been the Academy's favorite genre.) You also can't blame it on some personal grudge or PR issue, since both Gerwig and Robbie were personally nominated for their work over the film. in other categories.
The former is up for Best Adapted Screenplay alongside her partner Noah Baumbach, while the latter is up for Best Picture as one of the film's four producers. Actually, the problem here is primarily one of optics: no Gerwig in the director's race, which has historically been dominated by men, and no Robbie in the Best Actress nomination, despite the fact that she's one of the savviest movie stars we have .
Barbie stars Margot Robbie and Greta Gerwig Photo: FilmMagic
But that makes the answer also a matter of optics—and no working actor, stumped, is going to shrug and say, “No, I'm really glad they didn't do that.” ” cut it out, personally wasn’t a fan.” But there's an unasked additional question here that makes the calculation more difficult: Which existing candidate are you giving up to make room?
“Barbie” is a good director's film, but no more so than “Oppenheimer”, “Poor People”, “Killers of the Flower Moon”, “Anatomy of a Fall” or “Zone of Interest”. And while I personally would have preferred Robbie to be in the running for Best Actress over, say, five-time nominee Annette Bening (who's up for the mediocre swimming biopic Nyad), few in Hollywood would openly criticize a colleague's work, especially one who is quite popular. really made it to this list.
All this stems from a confusion that began at the Oscars some 20 years ago: awards that were always intended to recognize excellence, at least in theory, began to serve as validation instead. Crash won Best Picture in 2006 not because it was literally the best film (many of us would argue that it was the worst by some margin), but because it spoke solemnly to the rising racial tensions in the era's United States Bush in a way that was acceptable to wealthy residents of Los Angeles. (Oddly enough, its main competitor, the gay western “Brokeback Mountain”, was still “a little overkill” for the Academy at that time.)
As the hunger for dignity grew, films targeting philistine issues began to take over. The spectacle that defined the 1990s and early aughts (when Best Picture winners included Braveheart, Titanic, Gladiator and Chicago) has been replaced by races in which choosing a winner is more like supporting which something's going on. “Honor the man, honor the film,” was Harvey Weinstein’s 2015 “Imitation Game” campaign slogan. It was an attempt to convince voters that by supporting a tawdry war biopic, Alan Turing's legacy would be preserved.
Sandra Bullock in the 2006 Oscar-winning accident. Photo: Allstar/Lionsgate
That particular gambit didn't pay off, but the broader lesson stuck—and had consequences far beyond the Oscar race. Soon, a vague aura of progressiveness became the central theme of most blockbuster marketing campaigns, with studios like Marvel positioning their interchangeable computer devices as champions of different demographics. Every ticket purchased to see Miracles was ostensibly a blow to the representation of black and South Asian women on screen: activism has never required less effort.
That's the sentiment that sitcom actor John Stamos may have unwittingly succumbed to when earlier this week he praised Gerwig and Robbie's film on Instagram for “deepening into feminist themes” and “challenging patriarchal norms” before than to urge his 4.2 million subscribers to fix the double Oscar. disdain for the words “I’ll watch Barbie tonight.”
Ironically, recent changes in the Academy's demographics have seen idiosyncratic and ambitious work come back into vogue, and it now appears that the Oscar era is coming to an end. It wasn't that long ago that films like Poor People, Anatomy of a Fall, and Zone of Interest would have been on everyone's list of the most overlooked by critics: today they receive a lot of nominations.
But for awards season PR teams, some useful ambiguity remains. Recent campaigns for Best Picture winners as disparate as Moonlight, Green Book, CODA and Everything All At Once have successfully blurred the line between the purported social relevance of films' content and brilliance. their skills.
However, in each of these cases, the Academy's endorsed support at least had some material value – no matter how you look at them (and to be clear, I believe Moonlight ” – a great film), they were not box office Barbies. However, when you've made over $1 billion and dominated the cultural conversation around the world for about six months, it's hard to imagine what further validation a Best Director nomination could really provide.
As for repeating viewing Barbie. tonight, or any other night, isn't a bad idea. But it's better to do it because you really like the movie.
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