The Motion Picture Association of America has egg on its face once again. Bright pink egg.
The Academy’s Oscar nominations came out today, and Barbie is woefully absent from two major categories: Best Director and Best Actress. That means that industry darlings and last year’s biggest film names, Greta Gerwigh (director) and Margot Robbie (Actress), did not get a nomination in their respective categories, a shocking conclusion to the awards season for the biggest film of 2023.
For many, the outrage at the Academy will be obvious. After multiple years of the Best Director award finally going to non-white, non-American, non-male directors, it looked like the Academy had finally successfully pivoted, but somehow, a critically lauded box office smash with a star female director and lead misses out on two big noms. Not only that, but all the 2024 Best Director nominees are white and four of them are men. Meanwhile, Robbie is easily one of the biggest names in Hollywood at the moment, and her turn as the titular Barbie has landed her Best Actress nominations (and some wins) non-stop. It is definitely not a good look for the Academy to have shut Barbie out of two major categories.
The thing is, the Academy as an organization probably hates this just as much as everyone else does. For years now, the Oscars have been reorganizing and inviting in new voters to diversify the voting pool in order to nominate a wider array of films. It has indeed been paying off, with female and minority directors winning Best Director, international films winning Best Picture, and a slew of nominations and wins for minority-led films across the board. Now, however, all of that progress is visually washed away to casual observers, whether justified or not. Every headline coming out about Gerwig’s missed nomination (only made worse by the all-white, mostly male list of noms) and Robbie’s snub will paint an unfortunate picture to general audiences. This is bad for the Academy, which doesn’t control who people vote for, and probably would not have chosen Barbie to get snubbed like this.
In past years, the Academy could have at least pointed to international directors and actors getting nominated as a sign that its efforts at inclusion are working, but not this year. The two international films that theoretically helped push Gerwig out of contention – Anatomy of a Fall and The Zone of Interest – are French and British/US/Polish productions. Sure, Anatomy of a Fall was directed by Justine Triet, giving the Academy at least one female director to demand praise for, but there’s no rule that only one female director can get a nom.
That’s not to say that Triet does not deserve praise for an incredible film, but for the Academy, Barbie sitting there would be great. In fairness, they can point to the fact that the most ever female-directed films were nominated for Best Picture, but Barbie is the gold star everyone knows about.
Aside from the optics of the Academy regressing into old habits of voting, the organization also wants big movies to win at the Oscars. It’s the entire reason that the Best Picture category was expanded into 10 films, allowing for a wider variety of nominees to be covered and hopefully more blockbusters. With Barbie, the Academy had a perfect poster child for both its ability to nominate popular movies and its progress away from all-white, all-male nominations in categories where both genders are nominated together. Now that poster is peeling off the wall with the word snub graffitied over it.
To be clear, Barbie netted a whole host of other nominations outside of Best Director and Best Actress. It landed a Best Picture nomination (netting Robbie a nom there as she was a producer on the film); America Ferrara landed a Best Supporting Actress nomination after being snubbed at the Globes; it pulled in a host of “smaller” award noms like Best Song; and Ryan Gosling absurdly picked up a Best Supporting Actor nomination. The latter, of course, makes this all look even worse as the male “lead” in a film deconstructing the patriarchy gets a nomination when the female lead does not. It’s all just a snowball of awful looks for the Academy.
It also spells bad news for Barbie‘s chances of winning in the categories it was nominated in, pushing the year’s top-grossing movie even more to the edges of the awards show. Barbie was already a longshot for Best Picture, with Oppenheimer rolling in with all the momentum, but if you’re not landing a Best Director nomination, you’re definitely not winning Best Picture. Both Gosling and Ferrara are very long shots to win in their categories as well, with Ferrara maybe having an outside chance. That leaves Barbie‘s best shot at winning anything its two nominations for Best Song, a category that’s pretty far removed from the “big” ones. There is no denying that Barbie, which was viewed by people all over the world this past year, will be shunted to the side at this year’s Oscars, and it’s got to kill the Academy.
It’s not just the Academy, however. The film industry is still struggling to recover from the pandemic, and the magic of Barbenheimer was a single bright spot in a year that saw massive blockbusters and comic book movies fizzle at the box office. Barbie was half of a victory lap that Hollywood could hang its hat on, and the Academy is nothing if not an organization to promote Hollywood. Now, here it is with a narrative that eliminates its attempts at diversity and what is sure to be a poor showing for a film that everyone loved and paid to go see. That’s not what the Academy wants or needs right now, and it must be cursing its voting population for doing this to the show and Barbie.
