Is the Barbie Oscars snub justified?

When the dust settled on the Oscar nominations, the Barbie movie—the cultural icon it was—received a whopping eight nominations: Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress and two nominations for Best Original Song. 

There were two glaring omissions. The highest-grossing movie of 2023 was the brainchild of Margot Robbie and Greta Gerwig. Margot wasn’t just a producer spearheading the project from the depths of development hell, she also delivered a stirring performance that injected emotive depth into the eponymous plastic doll. Greta Gerwig didn’t just write the screenplay with her husband Noah Baumbach, she was the director of a film that delved into the nuanced layers of womanhood.

Neither received an Oscar nomination for Best Actress or Best Director. Most egregiously, Robbie’s co-star Ryan Gosling received a nomination. That seemingly proved the movie’s point about the ‘Ken’s of the world gaining recognition more easily, and echoed the Oscar’s spotty past with appreciating women.

How people responded to the Barbie Oscars snub

The backlash was immediate.

Famous people and organisations weighed in.

For his part, Ryan Gosling released a well-received statement about his nomination, where he expressed disappointment at his colleagues’ snubs and stated that “there is no Ken without Barbie”. America Ferrera, who received a nomination for Best Supporting Actress, also noted her dismay.

There was counter-backlash too. Some noted the overshadowing of other snubs, such as for Past Lives. Director Celine Song and leading actress Greta Lee were both overlooked.

Why did the Oscars snub Barbie?

To understand how this furor over the nominations came about, we should first understand how Oscar nominations work. 

Nominations come from the input of Academy members, with members from a branch of the Academy voting for their corresponding categories: Directors vote for Best Director nominees and actors vote for the acting categories; the Academy at large votes for Best Picture nominees.

Therein lies a potential problem: the composition of Academy members, an exclusive club with stringent entry requirements. The directors in the Academy, “made up of just 587 voters, about a quarter of which are women”, according to the New York Times, snubbed both Greta Gerwig and Celine Song. Despite recent strides made by the Academy to diversify its ranks, the membership of women in the Academy at large is still notably little. Only 34% of members being women this year. This sadly reflects industry trends. Men still disproportionately hold many key industry positions, according to a study by the University of Southern California Annenberg Inclusion initiative.

Why this matters

The disproportionately male composition of the Academy, and the industry-at-large, has an effect. Women directors are more likely to tell stories about women. Take Greta Gerwig for example, whose previous acclaimed films include Little Women and Lady Bird. Both films centre around the experiences of women. 

These stories would find more resonance with women. Also meaning that as the Academy remains largely not-women, come nomination season, these stories’ artistic merit in articulating female experiences will also be less appreciated. People like stories that speak to them, that give voice to their experiences. Just ask the Academy, often accused of loving stories about their own industry.

That said, there’s always a danger that efforts to increase representation within the Academy may be tokenistic in nature, without addressing the root causes for the disparity in the composition of the industry itself or appreciating the nuances in the perspectives of minorities.

Other possible reasons for the Barbie Oscars snub

If you look at the larger picture, the progress that the awards have made in representing women is also tangible. A record three films by women are up for Best Picture: the aforementioned Barbie and Past Lives, and Anatomy of a Fall. One-third of the total nominees are also women.

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In particular, Anatomy of a Fall received nominations for Best Director and Best Actress that Barbie didn’t. It’s also an unabashedly feminist movie. It studies the power dynamics within a marriage and the societal scrutiny faced by powerful, ambitious women. The difference is that Anatomy of a Fall is a courtroom drama. Barbie is a musical comedy—a genre historically snubbed by the Oscars.

More than that, popular blockbuster films like Barbie have not performed well at the Oscars in recent history.

What this backlash says about the Oscars

If snubbing Barbie for Best Director and Best Actress nominations is a matter of Academy preferences, this possibly reflects the Academy not taking the movie seriously. The subsequent backlash against the nominations may be more reflective of a broader trend: of award shows and audiences diverging in taste. 

In many ways, as a blockbuster, Barbie's nominations for a wide array of categories is an anomaly. When you look at nomination trends in the past two decades: the Oscars shun popular movies, even for nominations. 

This divergence in taste is deadly for the Oscars. It signals a fading relevance between the movies lauded by the Academy and the larger population. As viewers don’t recognise the movies garnering nominations, viewership starkly declines.

The Oscars have sought to arrest this trend, increasing the number of Best Picture nominees each year to 10 movies in 2022. There was speculation that the aim was to open up the category to popular movies. Nominating blockbusters like Top Gun: Maverick and Avatar: The Way of Water for Best Picture last year coincided with the Oscars viewership numbers rebounding to pre-pandemic levels. 

Whether the Barbie (and Oppenheimer) nominations this year will raise viewership numbers is to be seen.