The ‘Barbie’ Oscar Snub Discourse is Peak White Feminism
By stacy lee kong
Image: Shutterstock
I can’t believe I’m saying this, but… I kind of miss the discourse about award shows and diversity that we usually get into at this time of year. Yes, I’m a little tired of talking about why industry awards matter, even when they fail—often spectacularly—to recognize people who aren’t cis, white and able-bodied. I’ve also probably said all I have to say about the ways award shows strategically offer recognition to some groups, sometimes, and how that’s not really a mark of progress. But I’d much rather be talking about those topics than whatever it is the internet has been doing this week, which is… throwing a multi-day pity party for two white women who were nominated for Oscars, just not the right ones, I guess?
A quick recap: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences released its 2024 Oscar nominations on Tuesday, and, though they were recognized for their work, Barbie’s Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie didn’t get the nods people thought they would—Best Director and Performance By An Actress In A Leading Role, respectively. The movie itself received a very respectable eight nominations in total: Best Picture (Robbie is nominated here as co-producer), Performance By An Actor In A Supporting Role (Ryan Gosling as Ken), Performance By An Actress In A Supporting Role (America Ferrera as Gloria), Achievement In Costume Design, Adapted Screenplay (Gerwig is nominated here, alongside her husband and co-writer, Noah Baumbach), Original Song (twice, for “I'm Just Ken” and “What Was I Made For?”) and Achievement In Production Design. That being said, it was pretty ironic that the two women who were instrumental in making the movie were snubbed for the highest profile, ‘sexiest’ awards they were eligible for, especially since Gosling’s Ken was recognized—twice.
Unfortunately, that perfectly reasonable observation morphed into a discourse so incredibly irritating that it overshadowed necessary conversations about inequality, patriarchy and white supremacy, not to mention actual women of colour who did receive nominations, some of them for Barbie. So… that’s what we’ll be discussing this week, obvs.
Why did Hillary Clinton have anything to say about these snubs?????
If you were on the internet this week, you’d be forgiven for thinking there were no other actors, movies or even awards to talk about, because it seemed like everyone had a take on Gerwig and Robbie’s snubs. Some of those were fine—Gosling released a statement saying in part, “But there is no Ken without Barbie, and there is no Barbie movie without Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie, the two people most responsible for this history-making, globally-celebrated film. No recognition would be possible for anyone on the film without their talent, grit and genius. To say that I’m disappointed that they are not nominated in their respective categories would be an understatement.” And okay, I admit I laughed at police in Robbie’s native Australia posting about their investigation into ‘Margot being Robbied.’
But others were not just unhinged, they were downright offensive. L.A. Times culture critic and columnist Mary McNamara wrote a column on Tuesday afternoon that began, “If only Barbie had done a little time as a sex worker. Or barely survived becoming the next victim in a mass murder plot. [Emphasis mine.] Or stood accused of shoving Ken out of the Dream House’s top window. Certainly millions of Barbie fans are currently wishing they could push someone—perhaps a member or two of the film academy—out of a very high window. How on earth does the list of 2024 Oscar nominations not include Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie, who, respectively, directed and starred in a film that defied all critical expectations and made moviegoing fun again?”
McNamara’s thesis is that it is unfeminist to consider ‘serious’ movies as more award-worthy than ‘fun’ movies, a sentiment I agree with. However, she makes this point by positioning the other best actress nominees as undeserving. Her first line refers to three of them: Emma Stone for Poor Things (a movie that is fun, though perhaps a little less pink than Barbie), Lily Gladstone for Killers of the Flower Moon and Sandra Hüller for Anatomy of a Fall. I want to draw particular attention to McNamara’s decision to include Gladstone in what I’m sure she thought was a really clever rhetorical strategy. They are only the second Native American person to be nominated for best actress (Yalitza Aparicio was nominated for her role in Roma in 2018) and the fourth Indigenous person to ever be nominated in this category, and they’ve received rave reviews for their turn as Mollie Burkhart, the Osage wife of a white man who plotted to murder her family. Furthermore, Killers of the Flower Moon is not just about a “mass murder plot.” Thematically, it addresses the ongoing genocide of Indigenous people throughout the Americas. So… perhaps we don’t imply that Gladstone is not as worthy of recognition as Robbie, and that this subject matter is not as important as Barbie?
And then there was Western Imperialism Barbie herself, Hillary Clinton, who tweeted her support for the duo on Wednesday. Consider this: On November 14, when the death toll in Palestine had reached approximately 11,000 people, Clinton published an op-ed in The Atlantic saying, “a full cease-fire that leaves Hamas in power would be a mistake. For now, pursuing more limited humanitarian pauses that allow aid to get in and civilians and hostages to get out is a wiser course.” Putting aside the absolute evil of suggesting that a temporary pause in ethnic cleansing and genocide is a viable and desirable strategy, and the fact that civilians who “get out” of Gaza are likely never to return to their homes or homeland, this perspective did not indicate any real care for women, who, alongside their children, made up the bulk of fatalities at the time. Two months later, the death toll has topped 25,000 people, 70% of whom are women and children. Palestinian women are undergoing C-sections without anaesthesia and women and girls are using dirty scraps of fabric torn from tents in place of pads and tampons, which increases their risk of infection and toxic shock syndrome. Gaza no longer has any operating women’s shelters. About 500,000 Palestinians are facing “catastrophic hunger” and, since women and girls tend to be hit the hardest by food insecurity, they are disproportionately at risk for starvation. But does Clinton have anything to say about the women of Palestine? She does not! She does have the time to send her condolences to Gerwig and Robbie, though, and to reassure them that they are “Kenough.”
Which… is honestly disgusting.
This discourse totally erases the experiences of racialized women, good and bad
And to be clear, it’s not just Clinton. The (mostly white) women who are passionately defending Gerwig and Robbie similarly have little to say about the plight of racialized women around the world. They don’t even have anything to say about the racialized actors who didn’t get recognized for their work this week! I mean: Past Lives was nominated for Best Picture, but its director, Celine Song, and star, Greta Lee, were also snubbed for Best Director and Performance By An Actress In A Leading Role. (Song was nominated for Original Screenplay.) Teyana Taylor has been described as “heartbreakingly good” in A Thousand and One, but that wasn’t enough to earn an Oscar nom. Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor knew a nomination was a longshot, but people definitely thought she deserved one. The Colour Purple was largely shut out of the Oscars; it didn’t get a Best Picture nod and neither Fantasia Barrino or Taraji P. Henson were nominated for their roles, though Danielle Brooks did get nominated in the best supporting actress category.
What’s perhaps even more telling, though, is that those women with so much to say in defence of Barbie didn’t seem to recognize the nominations that did happen as feminist wins. Ferrera is a first-time nominee, the ninth Latina to ever be nominated for an Oscar and the first person of Honduran descent to be nominated in any category. I don’t love that we’re still doing that thing where we’re excited that it has taken 95 years for an industry award to recognize a person from a particular marginalized group, but you’d think nominating a woman of colour who was actually in the movie you’re going to bat for would be, I dunno, notable? In fact, this year’s nominations are among the most diverse ever. People of colour were recognized in every single acting category, including Brooks and Da’Vine Joy Randolph for The Holdovers, while Song is the first Asian woman to be recognized for Original Screenplay. This also goes beyond just women of colour; Colman Domingo made history as the first Afro Latine person to be nominated for best actor, while Jeffrey Wright and Sterling K. Brown were nominated for best actor and best supporting actor for their roles in American Fiction, the first time that’s ever happened for two Black actors. This is also the first year that two openly LGBTQ+ actors—Domingo and Jodie Foster, who received a best supporting actress nomination for her role in Nyad—were recognized for playing LGBTQ+ characters.
Refinery29 Australia’s Alexandra Koster put it perfectly: “We have a serious issue if we're more passionate about a white woman not being nominated than celebrating the women of colour in the film who actually were nominated—and against the odds, at that. Has the Academy missed the entire point of Barbie? Or has everyone else—who seem far more concerned with pedalling the rhetoric of white feminism than celebrating the achievements of people of colour? When a white woman isn't nominated, people lose it. But when people of colour defy the odds, they're ambivalent.
So… is this outrage about feminism, or is it about white women’s feelings?
This is not to say that I think Barbie’s snubs are deserved. As The Hollywood Reporter’s Rebecca Sun pointed out this week, Gerwig’s first three films have been nominated for Best Picture, but she’s only been nominated for Best Director once, for Lady Bird. “That’s enough of a data set, relatively speaking, to legitimately interrogate why the Academy’s directors branch, which is responsible for determining the nominees in its category, consistently has not responded to her work the way the rest of the Academy’s membership has,” Sun writes. “It’s worth noting, again according to Feinberg’s reporting, that the directors branch is currently 75 percent male. Yet it’s too simple to chalk up Barbie’s snubs to mere sexism on its surface. (For one, Gosling and Robbie did not compete head-to-head for their acting nominations.) And claiming misogyny also erases Justine Triet’s accomplishment; the Anatomy of a Fall director is the only female nominee in the category. A harder but better question to answer is whether the Academy is biased against considering certain types of work, both in front of and behind the camera, as more ‘awards-caliber’ than others.”
When it comes to Robbie, I’d argue that her Best Picture nomination was more ‘important’ than a nod for playing Barbie. That award recognizes the behind-the-scenes work she did as a producer to get this movie made—something that often goes unacknowledged, even as she’s doing that work. According to a 2022 Vanity Fair profile by writer Rebecca Ford, “Robbie, to be clear, is a true working producer. She’s in those preproduction meetings, she’s on set, she’s putting out fires and getting ‘yelled at by agents.’ When I point out that many actors who get producer credits don’t actually, um, do any producing, she says, ‘Yeah, that pissed me off. It’s so annoying because I have to fight every time.’” As Ford goes on to explain, Robbie means ‘fight to be taken seriously,’ because people will often leave her off email chains, neglect to invite her to calls and direct money questions to her producing partners, even though her producing credits include I, Tonya, Promising Young Woman, Maid and Saltburn, among others.
Meanwhile, a best actress nod for Greta Lee would be meaningful not just because of the work she did in Past Lives, but also because this is the first time in a career that spans almost 20 years that she’s even qualified for a best actress nomination. By comparison, “half of the 20 actors nominated for the Oscars this year have been to this dance before; they are also all white… [Meanwhile, Lee’s] experience isn’t unique among performers from historically excluded backgrounds. With at-bats few and far between (both for the individual performer and for the community they represent), the snubs hit different,” Sun notes.
Aren’t those more interesting and important conversations than whatever was happening on X/Twitter this week? I think they are—but I also know why we saw this hyper-focus on white women’s feelings about these snubs. First, there is an impulse to use the language of social justice to legitimize our opinions and to “justify why [a thing we love] is therefore more important than something else,” as writer P.E. Moskowitz argued this week. They go on to explain that this is “deranged, and one of the most stifling features of our culture in the last ~decade... The constant framing of personal preference as a matter of morality not only makes interpretation and critique of culture incredibly stifling, it also successfully distracts from building an actually-moral vision of the world that is not based on narcissistic personal preference.”
We talk about snubs all the time; the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences leaves out deserving performances every single year, which is why there’s a whole trope around people winning Oscars to ‘make up’ for the times they should have won, or been nominated. But this conversation was different, because it became a proxy for feminist values. In some of the conversations I’ve seen—and had—it felt like if I wasn’t appropriately outraged that Gerwig and Robbie didn’t get these specific nominations, I wasn’t really a feminist. Conversely, my feelings about the racialized people who were nominated, those who were snubbed and the way we tend to conflate single instances of representation as progress were incidental, at best.
Which brings me to other reason, which is simpler but unfortunately far more deeply ingrained in our society: though misogyny permeates everything, the Western world remains deeply committed to valuing, celebrating and protecting white women, which is why a perceived slight against two famous white women dominated our cultural conversations for days and why the white feminists who saw themselves in Gerwig and Robbie, and therefore felt moved to defend them, were given so much space to do so.
I’ve seen lots of people respond to people’s frenzied emotions over Barbie by asking why we can’t just be normal. I also had the same thought! But unfortunately… this is normal.
And Did You Hear About…
This beautiful essay about cold-water swimming.
Music critic Steven Hyden’s meta but entertaining column about singer-songwriter/TikTok phenomenon Noah Kahan, whose song “Stick Season” stays on my FYP, despite me being pretty ambivalent about it.
This super interesting Vox feature about social media influencers who become famous for posting about their serious or terminal illnesses.
The widening ideological divide between young women, who are becoming more and more progressive, and young men, who are… not (and, in some cases, are becoming more conservative). Data journalist John Burn-Murdoch also breaks this down on X/Twitter.
Weight Limit, a thoughtful Teen Vogue series that looks at the rise of weight loss drugs and how they’re impacting young people.
All the clips in this thread of X/Twitter users’ favourite celebrity interviews.
Thank you for reading this week’s newsletter! Still looking for intersectional pop culture analysis? Here are a few ways to get more Friday:
💫 Join Club Friday, our membership program. Members get early access to Q&As with pop culture experts, Friday merch and deals and discounts from like-minded brands.
💫 Follow Friday on social media. We’re on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and even (occasionally) TikTok.
💫 If you’d like to make a one-time donation toward the cost of creating Friday Things, you can donate through Ko-Fi.