Hillary Clinton (and the rest of the Internet) can’t quit the Barbie Oscars discourse
Margot Robbie and Greta Gerwig won the year in film, but won't win acting and directing Oscars. Is the Barbie backlash warranted?
Aux Features Barbie
The road to hell is paved with discourse, and no one can discourse better (or just more) than film fans. Most years around awards season, an outrage narrative will arise regarding a particular scandal or snub, one where the tenor of the discourse begins to eclipse the actual subject of the discourse. Such is the case in the 2024 Oscars race, which left Margot Robbie and Greta Gerwig out of the running for Best Actress and Best Director, respectively. In the wake of the nomination announcement, there was an outcry from Barbie’s legion of fans—and an equal and opposite reaction from Barbie’s haters, a discourse that overwhelmed the cinema section of the Internet. In other words, Barbie continues to be a cultural behemoth, one that encompasses so much of the tension in the current entertainment landscape: identity politics and the false underdog phenomenon.
Part of the Oscars backlash is due to Barbie’s messaging, which managed to make “Stereotypical Barbie” (a fashion doll for children, let’s not forget) into an icon of personhood for women everywhere. Barbie’s feminism may be clunky and overt, but it resonated—as evidenced by America Ferrera’s Best Supporting Actress nomination on the strength of her “women” monologue. Gosling’s Best Supporting Actor nomination only exacerbated the issue, creating a vague sense of life imitating art: men’s work is always valued over women, a very symptom of the patriarchy that infected Ken in the film.
Barbie’s most ardent defenders seem to conflate their own personal politics with the reception of the movie, meaning their defenses become overblown, sometimes to a dangerous degree. For example, Los Angeles Times columnist Mary McNamara lamented Gerwig and Robbie’s snubs proved the Academy missed Barbie’s point. In an excerpt that subsequently went viral, she wrote, “If only Barbie had done a little time as a sex worker. Or barely survived becoming the next victim in a mass murder plot. Or stood accused of shoving Ken out of the Dream House’s top window.”
Problematically, much of the Oscar criticism like McNamara’s elides the work of other women in film. The glib reference to “becoming the next victim in a mass murder plot” is an egregious reduction of the story of Mollie Kyle, the central figure of an overlooked American tragedy that became Killers Of The Flower Moon. Lily Gladstone, who played Mollie, is the first-ever Native American nominated in the Best Actress category. Similarly, the mention of shoving Ken out of a window references Anatomy Of A Fall, which earned a Best Director nod for Justine Triet, whose nomination has largely been overshadowed by the Gerwig snub.
If the Barbie snubs are a case of life imitating art, so too is the discourse defending Barbie. Much of it reflects an overly simplistic, individualistic, myopic version of feminism that underlies the film’s message. Ferrera has observed that “there are a lot of people who need” the kind of “Feminism 101” that Barbie is selling, and that’s fair enough. But the movie and its passionate stans appear to be digging their heels into a political moment that’s already passed—see onetime presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton tweeting to reassure Gerwig and Robbie that they are “Kenough.” In her column, McNamara concludes, “As history has proved time and again, assuming a woman is going to be a shoo-in for anything (even the actress category) is never a good idea because to succeed, women have to defy all manner of expectations while also meeting every one.”
Barbie has succeeded by almost any other metric
The thing is, Robbie and Gerwig have succeeded, by almost every possible measure except those two individual categories. Robbie is nominated for Best Picture for being the producer who facilitated the most successful film of the year, solidifying her place as one of Hollywood’s biggest power players offscreen just as much as she is in front of the camera. Gerwig, meanwhile, was nominated alongside Noah Baumbach for Best Adapted Screenplay, her fourth nomination in six years. She was previously nominated in the Best Director category for Lady Bird, part of the rare cohort to earn that nomination for a solo debut film and one of only eight women in history to be recognized in the category. Gerwig is also the only director ever whose first three solo-directed films have been nominated for Best Picture.
Though they missed out on nominations in some highly competitive categories, Robbie and Gerwig’s work has been acknowledged—and that’s on top of the piles and piles of money they made from the film’s smash success. Barbie is a cinematic unicorn, a big-budget comedy with near-universal critical acclaim that also managed to attract awards attention. Rarely has a blockbuster managed to score so many Oscar nominations, especially in the 21st century. Yet somehow the idea has emerged that these two women have been unfairly overlooked, despite the fact that we’ve all been looking at nothing but Barbie for months on end.
“This is called commercial backlash,” Steven Spielberg said after Jaws earned a Best Picture nomination but missed Best Director, a clip which resurfaced in the wake of Tuesday’s nomination announcements. “When a film makes a lot of money, people resent it. Everybody loves a winner. But nobody loves a winner.” Maybe that’s true in Barbie’s case. There’s always a degree of backlash, some of it mean-spirited, to things that are popular. But lately there’s been a rise in the rabid defense of popular culture, which doesn’t really need the defense, seeing as how it’s already popular.
That’s the false underdog phenomenon, wherein someone or something that’s already undeniably on top is treated as though they’ve been marginalized. Stan culture has exacerbated the issue—see: the cult of Taylor Swift—but it’s become increasingly relevant in cinema discourse when populist thinking insists on putting Marvel movies in conversation with Oscar hopefuls. Being omitted from Oscars categories doesn’t make Margot Robbie and Greta Gerwig any less successful. On the flip side, acting as if those two snubs erase the many successes they have enjoyed is reductive to Barbie’s massive ascension. The Academy Awards are always a political rat race. Missing a couple nods isn’t, this time, an attack on womanhood or an underdog getting shut out. Nevertheless, Barbie will undoubtedly persist.
74 Comments
8 fucking nominations isn’t enough? They basically broke the whole “No Genre Movies” rule for Barbie already. Toxic femininity at it’s finest. Yes, Barbie was a phenomenon. Why does that justify diminishing other actresses work this year?
Gerwig is also the only director ever whose first three solo-directed films have been nominated for Best Picture.I don’t think this factoid supports the argument you think it does.
10 Best Pic noms5 Best Director nomsIt’s really easy to see how this could happen if you’re outrage glasses are off.
“such is the case in the 2024 Oscars race, which left Margot Robbie and Greta Gerwig out of the running for Best Actress and Best Director, respectively.”
Nobody left them out of anything. They weren’t disqualified from the race, they simply weren’t nominated.
“Everybody loves a winner. But nobody loves a winner.” Maybe that’s true in Barbie’s case.”
EIGHT NOMINATIONS. That’s what Barbie got. Seems like a LOT of people love Barbie.
Hillary who?
Bill Clinton’s side piece.
Bill Clinton’s boss.
Doesn’t that imply he was actually fucking her?
Whoever it is up there keeping Olan Mills in business.
The guy who climbed Everest?
Tenzing Norgay?
You’re thinking of Norzing Tengay.
Some lady still living rent free in people’s heads.
Every generation gets the “Pokémon Go to the polls” that it deserves.
Running the risk of being pilloried by my own people (ie, the woke scolds and cancel culture spoilsports of the Internet at large): Barbie wasn’t actually all that great, and it doesn’t really deserve most of the acclaim that it’s received. It was relatively progressive for a children’s movie/toy commercial/nostalgia cash-in, but the fact that it’s held up as somehow being the vanguard for feminism in America says more about the jarring rightward shift in the US over the last decade or so than it does about the quality of the movie.
I’m not even gonna comment on the feminism aspect but any movie that has me laughing my ass off at both a dance scene and a beach invasion scene is gonna be up there on my ‘best of the year’ list, personally.
It’s possible that Barbie got “Forest Gumped” for me, which is to say I consumed so much hype about how great it was that there was no way the movie could live up to expectations when I finally manage to see it, but as a genuine fan of nearly everyone involved, it just didn’t click with me.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That’s definitely possible. I went into it thinking that the hype was probably overblown(I go into everything that’s hyped with that attitude, because 99.999% of the time it is), which it was to some extent, but hot damn if it isn’t a much better flick than it has any right to be.
I enjoyed the Barbie parts but the Ken-takover part seemed forced.
The debate about how well it Does Feminism is going to go on until the sun burns out and I don’t think I have anything especially worthwhile to add to it, but just on the basis of being a big screen comedy, it’s one of the best I’ve seen in years. The scene of the Kens all playing ‘Push’ simultaneously on the beach is by itself funnier than several entire comedic movies. Oscar worthy? Who’s to say. But it’s a damn fine piece of cinema.
“I don’t know if it was feminist enough, but oh man were those men in the movie awesome” is a question that answers itself.
That’s an… interesting takeaway, considering the humor in that scene was at the expense of the Kens.
My point is that the Kens got to be funny.
“Woke scolds.” “Pilloried by my people.” Sure, Jan.
I was being flip, attempting to coopt the language of reactionary dipshits for comedic effect. It clearly went great.
Looking at the responses to your comment, who are the reactionaries again?
The main reason it didn’t work is that Northerneye actually is a wokescold, so any attempt at irony is going to fly right over their head, and just result in them getting angry and defensive.
So your people are right wing incels then
In your world of Idiocracy, I’m sure everyone who disagrees with you is.
The opposite of that, actually. I guess “wokescold” has a meaning other than “A person who is woke and scolds others who are not” that I’m unaware of. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
lmao, you proved his point brilliantly. Not thinking Barbie is the pinnacle of cinema makes you a “right wing incel.”
Thank you for ending the conversation. This stuff is a lot more fun if you actually make some points for discussion beyond just stating your own superiority to the hive mind.
I mean, the Academy has increasingly struggled to recognize comedy. I have no doubt a lot of the prestige drama picks (like Oppenheimer and Killers of the Flower Moon) are deserving. But I do get the impression that’s part of the problem here.
The Academy has taken itself way too seriously for a long, long time. The fact is that the Academy views comedy as inferior to drama, same with horror and animation. Don’t forget that the Best Animated Feature category was created because Beauty & The Beast had been nominated for Best Picture the previous year, and the Academy felt that animated movies don’t deserve Best Picture nominations.
That is wildly inaccurate. Beauty and the Beast came out in 1991. The first Best Animated Feature Oscar was presented in 2001, a decade later (Shrek won it). They had nothing to do with each other. The main reason it took so long for them to create Best Animated Feature is because, before the late 1990s, there were on average only 4 to 7 animated movies released to American theaters every year. The Disney Renaissance in the 80s-90s inspired other studios to invest in animation; computer animation accelerated the trend. They created the Best Animated Feature Oscar (again…a decade after Beauty and Beast came out) because at that point there were finally enough animated movies being released to make the category competitive.
Hell, they wouldn’t even recognize Snow White with a BP nom back in 37, despite it being universally regarded at the time as a major artistic breakthrough, one of the greatest films ever made, AND becoming the top grossing movie of all time until Gone with the Wind. They copped out and gave Disney an honorary Oscar.
Beauty and the Beast was nominated for Best Picture in 1992.The Best Animated Feature Oscar was first awarded in 2002.
So I’m wrong about the timing, but not about the attitude. The Academy considers animation a lesser form of film-making.
“Barbie’s most ardent defenders seem to conflate their own personal politics with the reception of the movie”huh weird never seen this phenomenon before!
“Rarely has a blockbuster managed to score so many Oscar nominations, especially in the 21st century.”What? That’s patently untrue. All the Lord of the Rings movies, The Dark Knight, Avatar, Inception, Gravity, Mad Max: Fury Road, Joker, Dune, just off the top of my head. There’s at least one blockbuster every year that rakes in nominations.
Hell, Return of the King won all 11 awards it was nominated for, tying another blockbuster- Titanic- for the most statuettes ever awarded. And speaking of Titanic, THAT film holds the record for the most nominations at 14.Listen, I get that the end of Jezebel, comments at The Root and Splinter have left a gaping hole in G/O Media “I’m going to demonstrate my wokeness by being endlessly contrarian and also I’m 14 and this is a Deep Observation” commentary, but the only thing AV Club has in common with them is the persistent inability to get the story straight.
That’s part of why the slate went to 10 BP nominees, to recognize highly popular films that wouldn’t normally ring the bell from a critical perspective.
I figured Hilary Clinton would be more of an Anatomy of a Fall fan.
Certainly there are a lot of people she would love to see defenestrated…
Stupid “rest of the Internet”. Glad I don’t go to sites that can’t stop the Greta Gerwig discourse.
Good news, Greta: The next movie you make is getting a Best Director nomination no matter what, because the Academy is going to feel obligated to make up for this snub. That’s right, the pressure’s off, girl! Go make whatever the hell you want! That Barbie Apology statue is yours, just as surely as there’s an Oscar on Scorsese’s mantle that’s technically for The Departed but is actually an apology for Goodfellas. And also Gangs of New York. And also Raging Bull. And like nine other movies.
Anyway, Greta: sorry they didn’t have room for you this year, they had to give apology nominations to a bunch of guys they snubbed in previous years.
Eh, I don’t know about that. Her next movie is Chronicles of Narnia, for Netflix. Don’t get me wrong, I bet it’ll be great, but Academy voters fucking hate Netflix. Hell CODA arguably won because a lot of voters wanted to spite Netflix and its zeal to win BP, by giving Apple+ the honor of being the first streamer to win the top prize. If Gerwig wants the Oscar, her best bet is to do something small again, in the vein of Ladybird. The Academy loves to honor the filmmaker who does something artistic after a blockbuster. Like Spielberg following up Jurassic Park with Schindler’s List. And while I’ve loved Gerwig’s bigger films, I do yearn to see a “smaller” one again like her debut. She talked at one time about doing a trilogy of films set in Sacramento, of which Ladybird was the first, and I hope she’ll still do that.
Narnia? Oh dear. You speak of Gerwig the way I feel about del Toro. He doesn’t know how happy he’d make this nobody if he’d make films like Chronos, Devil’s Backbone, Pan’s Labyrinth again. That was cinema.Pinocchio was great, though.
What Barbie backlash?Yeah there are a bunch of MRAs/incels who hated the movie from day one.But almost everyone I know liked or loved Barbie. Though, among my friends, the people most likely to be annoyed about no noms are the people who saw the fewest nominated/contending films.
Lol at an AV CLUB writer looking down at Barbie’s feminism for being basic
So you are saying that Greta and Margot should just be happy that they got nominated in a category, any category, doesn’t matter which one. To be upset at people who want to have a discourse is ridiculous. And it’s ironic that you think people are upset over a perceived slight when the snub is actually very much real.
I do wonder about how upset Gerwig and Robbie are. I’m not saying they’re not or they shouldn’t be, and I’m happy for America Ferrera and Ryan Gosling to have spoken up for them, but have either of them actually said they’re disappointed? Maybe they are just happy with the success they’ve seen so far.
A mountain of money can absorb a lot of tears.
You what no one is talking about is Titanic. When that film broke box office records and became a cultural phenomenon it was nominated and won Best Director, Best Film, Editing, Sound…. and like a bajillion Oscars. Now anyone who has watched the 20 different YouTube videos on how crappy that film was made knows it wasn’t a masterpiece. No one at the time was saying OH WELL TITANIC is hardly good enough to be an Oscar film … The bias here is clear.
Anti-Barbie backlash is saying the film wasn’t that great ignore the millions of people who were moved by a movie about a toy because it spoke to something greater. The film did the impossible, making people care about a toy and taking that lense onto society. How we treat the Barbie movie now is also as reflective of how we see women in this industry.
The people who did the nominating thought other actors and directors that did a better job than Gerwig and Robbie, both of whom have had nominations before.There isn’t any anti-Barbie backlash, the movie got nominations, including best picture. The director of a best picture nominee is hardly new. Poor America Ferrera can’t even enjoy her oscar nomination, she needs to be out here advocating for the poor downtrodden white women.
Firstly, I was alive at the time. People were absolutely slating the fact that Titanic was nominated for all the Oscars. Cameron was mocked for years over “I’M KING OF THE WORLD!”Secondly, I’m not sure that “twenty people on YouTube made videos dissing Titanic ergo it was never good and this is proof of anti-Barbie bias” is exactly a mic-drop. The fact that people are still making snarky YouTube videos about Titanic thirty years later is not proof that it is a good film, of course, but it absolutely is proof that for better or worse it has become a tentpole of modern popular culture.None of this is to say that Barbie wasn’t snubbed nor that there’s not a gendered element to this, but to be honest I’m not sure I agree a hunnerd percent with your police work here, Jennifer.
You left out McNamara dissing on “Poor Things” too, a film that was produced by Emma Stone and her company.
That article was just so piss poor
Or stood accused of shoving Ken out of the Dream House’s top window.And this is an egregious snub of using the word defenestrate.The opportunity comes up so seldomly, how can you not take it.
Ken should stay away from Prague.
Definitely. And he should away from Putin, who’s revived the practice.
That bit quoted from McNamara’s piece is super shitty, to the point where I can’t believe an editor didn’t call her up and say, “Hey, maybe don’t take a swipe at the first Native American woman to get a best actress nomination for portraying the survivor of a very real historic atrocity.”
Yeah, that quote was terrible all around.
As far as I’m concerned, the academy, America, missed the opportunity for a very meaningful dialogue about women and feminism when they all but ignored Sarah Polley’s Women Talking. I couldn’t find a single thing wrong with that film but it seems that America did.
I like how we still pretend in 2024 that public figures don’t pay people to write clever things on the internet for them.
Hillary Clinton can shut the fuck up
You first
I would uninvent the term “stan” if I could
I never got the whole concept of the best movie not also being the best director. There shouldn’t be a director award, just include the director with the producers for best picture. And the writers too.
Clinton’s post is one of the most cringeworthy things I’ve ever seen in my life. It’s been incredible to watch as center-liberal feminism eats its own tail.
The problem with the whole narrative that being upset over Margot’s snub is “white feminism at its worst” is that NO ONE is saying Lily Gladstone didn’t deserve her nomination. Why the jumping to conclusions that she would’ve been the one left out had Margot received a nomination for Best Actress? The other 4 nominees are all white. Carey Mulligan has got to be one of the most overrated starlets of modern prestige dramas- I can’t think of a single performance I’ve seen of hers that was any good.
It’s a mediocre movie that is only in the conversation because of the $$$$ WB spent to keep it there, and because of this endless nonsense perpetuated by the media that is somehow is a good and important film. It’s a corporate toy commercial with some white feminism 101 thrown in, and Ryan Gosling being better than what he was given to work with. People in the industry like Margo as a producer so that helps. People don’t really like Greta so that doesn’t. The End. How about instead we talk about the actually feminist and actually expertly made film that DID get nominated for best director – Anatomy of Fall.
The movie was fun. The movie was fine. I really liked the set design, performances by the two leads, and joyfully bonkers sense of humor. The feminist angle was clunky at times but coming from a good place I think, and the gentle teasing of male archetypes was genuinely funny and not the least bit threatening to me (my favorite moment is Ken’s double-sunglasses bit). Was it the best film of the year? No. Did it earn its place in the Oscars by being such a massive cultural phenomenon that clearly resonated with a large crowd of folks? Yeah, for sure. Were they snubbed? I don’t really think so. They both got nominations in other very meaningful categories that cover a major element of production they undertook (writing and producing, respectively) and that I genuinely think they both deserve.
Let’s all settle down? Lol who am I kidding, this place is a swamp!