'Barbie' Oscars Snub Explained
Chill out guys; I thought the Oscars don't mean anything. [1/24/2024]
The Oscar nominees are upon us folks and that means someone somewhere is angry about it. In this case it’s the fans of Barbie, who are dissappointed the film, though it was nominated in several categories, didn’t get into to vital ones in particular. The controversy arose from the fact these are top shelf categories where a woman would have been given the nod. The fact this seems to mirror the thematics of the movie has some people ablaze, but the nominations seem mostly pretty justified. Let’s start with Best Director.
Best Director Nominees 2024 (For the films of 2023)
Justine Triet, Anatomy of a Fall
Martin Scorsese, Killers of the Flower Moon
Christopher Nolan, Oppenheimer
Yorgos Lanthimos, Poor Things
Jonathan Glazer, The Zone of Interest
A sturdy lineup to be sure, with an unusual two foreign language films being represented alongside three celebrated directors in Scorsese, Nolan, and Lanthimos. With those three almost guaranteed a nomination, every other film was competing for the other two slots, and it’s nice to see the Oscars continuing their recent trend of keeping foreign language films in the conversation for many of the big awards. It’s safe to say this is one of the many very small steps in a good direction coming from the Academy of late.
Then we got the insanely competitive Oscar for Best Actress, a competitive category this year in terms of nominations although it’s pretty clear whose statue it is to lose.
Best Actress Nominees 2024
Annette Bening, Nyad
Lily Gladstone, Killers of the Flower Moon
Sandra Hüller, Anatomy of a Fall
Carey Mulligan, Maestro
Emma Stone, Poor Things
The buzz surrounding Lily Gladstone’s nomination as the first Native American woman in the category, as well as the controversy over whether she should be considered a lead at all, has made her inseparable from the category this year. Nobody is surprised at her nomination, and nobody will be surprised when she picks up the trophy on Oscars night. The rest of the nominations are pretty par for the course, lining up well with both predictions and the Best Picture nominees with one notable exception. Annette Bening in Nyad seemed to creep up on Oscar watchers and surprise us by snatching a slot many would consider locked down. Some were shocked Bening took a surprise nomination alongside her costar Jodie Foster in the supporting category.
But all that is nuance and Oscar politics. The people don’t care about these elite conversations! They want to know one thing; where is Barbie, darn it!? Social media was littered with videos and posts claiming the Oscars must have missed the point of the movie to have excluded some key players from nomination.
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Barbie was nominated for Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Production Design, Best Costume Design, and Best Original Song (twice!). In the acting categories, we see Ryan Gosling nominated for Supporting Actor and America Ferrera nominated for Supporting Actress. Yet the plastic icon’s director Greta Gerwig is nowhere to be seen, and considering the movie’s strong feminist viewpoint it seems strange to some that neither she nor lead actress Margot Robbie was nominated while Ryan Gosling looks like a great contender to take home the gold as Ken.
Some of the annoyance around Robbie’s snub is justified. Although Gosling shone as the absolute standout star of Barbie, the actress was given a much more challenging role. Stepping into the Barbie iconography is much more difficult, as she has not only the weight of the film as a whole but the pressure of thousands of women, feminists, and anti-feminists. The fact that this pressure is also what the movie is about is what makes this an ironic twist that everyone has taken up arms upon. Robbie undeniably had an incredibly hard road to the screen with this movie, and the fact it became the runaway success that it did made everyone speak in its language. The conclusion of so many people touched by that movie’s message is that the Academy must just be another Mojo Dojo Casa House if they’re nominating a Ken and not a Barbie.
Still, it’s important to remember that Robbie was not competing against Gosling for the nomination; she was competing against Carey Mulligan, Emma Stone, and the other best actress nominees in this year’s impressive lineup alongside the possible snubs Greta Lee for Past Lives and Fantasia Barrino for The Color Purple. The category was just a tough one to crack into this year. Perhaps her being outside the five was a mistake, but I doubt that any academy member was truly enacting the patriarchal power demonstrated in the film by voting to nominate Gosling or not voting to nominate Robbie, especially when the NBC sitcom-level performance from America Ferrera got a nomination as well. Now that’s not an excuse; just because one woman was nominated for the film doesn’t mean the Academy was being feminist. But it is evidence that it was just easier to get into Supporting Actress this year while Lead Actress was a tough pool.
Now we gotta talk about Greta Gerwig, one of perhaps three directors (alongside Jordan Peele and maybe Ari Aster) in her generation who has household name recognition. It’s no surprise that not nominating her would turn into a controversy; people saw her movie! Uneducated masses called for the Russo brothers to be nominated in 2020 just because it was a movie that a lot of people saw. But for Gerwig, the lack of nomination is a repeat of a year gone by. The phenomenal director is on a dream run right now, as Barbie marks the third of her three films directed solo to garner a Best Picture Nomination. Yet this is the second time her movies have done so without her in the competition for Best Director. The first film she solo directed, Lady Bird, gave her both nominations in 2018’s Oscars, while her adaptation of Little Women was nominated in 2020 without Gerwig featuring in the five possible Best Director slots.
So why did this happen? This was the highest-grossing film of the year; surely that should count for something, right? While yes, historically that can count for something, this instead seems like a strike against films as of late. Below you’ll see compiled a list of every director from 1977 onward1 to be nominated for the highest-grossing movie of that year.
Highest Grossing Movies Per Year With Best Director Nominees (1977-Present)
George Lucas, Star Wars (1977)
Robert Benton, Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)*
Steven Spielberg, Raiders of the Lost Ark (1980)
Steven Spielberg, E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
Barry Levinson, Rain Man (1988)*
Robert Zemeckis, Forrest Gump (1995)*
James Cameron, Titanic (1997)*
Steven Spielberg, Saving Private Ryan (1998)*
Peter Jackson, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)*
James Cameron, Avatar (2009)
* That year’s winner.
You’ll notice the huge fallout that happened after the 1990s; less and less movies since then have overlapped in taste between mainstream audiences and Oscar voters. Since 2009, no director with the highest grossing film of the year has been nominated for Best Director, including James Cameron who came back with a financially successful Best Picture nominee in the sequel Avatar: The Way of Water.
It’s easy to guess that in addition to the stiff competition for Best Director this year, Gerwig was left off the five due to her movie being a financial success rather than despite it. While the Oscars are recognizing more mainstream hits year by year (and I theorize the fourth highest domestic grosser of the year, Oppenheimer, will take home a Best Picture win) voters still cling to a bit more snobbery when considering Best Director. This, rather than an anti-feminist agenda, seems to be why Greta Gerwig was locked out of a nomination.
Coming Attractions:
With the Oscars nominees out I know everyone is clamoring for my own opinion on the best films of the year, but I will admit I have a lot to catch up on. With this year being the first of my podcast Always See Everything, I’ve been slammed with Criterion flicks to watch every week rather and just haven’t gotten enough theater experiences. Don’t worry; come Oscar ceremony time I should have my usual top ten list as well as some honorable mentions to touch on. But if you want to support me in the meantime, please subscribe to where most of my movie-watching is going right now: the Always See Everything podcast.
Box office records before 1977 are not as readily available on the internet. They exist, but mostly in books that I want to track down. Plus, who are we kidding; the people I’m arguing against haven’t seen more than a handful of movies made before Star Wars anyway.