Please calm down about the ‘Barbie’ drama

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The summer of 2023 saw the heavily anticipated release of Greta Gerwig’s magnum opus, “Barbie.” The film rose to critical and commercial success, empowering both women around the world and fat cat studio executives. With this immense success comes the inevitable discussion of the Oscars, which this film received no shortage of nominations for. However, there appears to be great discourse over two specific “snubs” that the film faced.

The snubs in question are Greta Gerwig’s lack of nomination for Best Director and lead actress Margot Robbie’s lack of nomination for Best Actress. This led to a wave of controversy from fans who believed that this was the result of sexism on the part of the Academy. Publications like The New York Times, major politicians like Joaquin Castro and gremlins on X have all made this claim without looking at this objectively.

The first thing you must realize is that the film already received eight other major nominations, including Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor and Best Adapted Screenplay. Considering Gerwig herself wrote the screenplay, the sexism argument makes less sense. America Ferrera was also nominated for her role in the film in the category of Best Supporting Actress.

To support this claim, proponents of the drama tend to cite Ryan Gosling’s nomination for Best Supporting Actor in his admittedly breathtaking role as Ken. First off, it’s an entirely different category entirely for men. Second, it is literally the Academy’s job to have an opinion deeming that a person is worthy of a nomination. Nominating one person and not another who is in a completely different category isn’t inherently sexism, it’s two separate opinions.

Another claim that defenders make is that Greta Gerwig wasn’t nominated for Best Director because it’s a male-dominated category. While I do think that there’s an overflow of male directors compared to female ones, the fact that people think she wasn’t nominated because she is a woman is questionable. 

I’m about to lay down a harsh truth: the Academy hates fun. While “Barbie” does contain brilliant filmmaking and intelligent feminist commentary, the fact that it’s a large blockbuster automatically makes it less “prestigious” in the Academy’s eyes. The other Best Director nominees contained some unique cinematography or editing. “Poor Things” has vivid, wildly imaginative imagery; “Oppenheimer” has crosscutting to black and white.

Compared to these films, Barbie seems plain, which is completely fine – but to the Academy, that might make it unworthy of a nomination. Justine Triet was also nominated for directing “Anatomy of a Fall,” so the directing category isn’t entirely comprised of men, either.

Listen, it sounds like I’m defending the Academy, but trust me, as a film major, I usually disagree with them the most. Trends like awarding “Crash” and “Shakespeare in Love” the awards for Best Picture, their undying hatred for animated films and the god-awful monologues during the show itself make the Oscars honestly quite insufferable to watch. I’ve been witnessing the Academy’s malarkey all my life, so a film not having as many nominations as people would like it to have seems like such a minute thing to complain about. 

Hollywood filmmaking is still a male-dominated industry, I agree with that, but the nominations this awards season are not a product of sexism.