The Oscar Nominations Prove That It's The Same As It Ever Was
On nominations and outrage
I couldn’t stop thinking about the Oscar nominations all day yesterday. Normally, I’m like, “oh dope” about the stuff I like getting nominated, or I’m pissed that something I loved didn't get any love. And then I move on about my day. But not today kids!
To some people, Barbie getting nominated for Best Picture but not Best Director or Best Actress was the biggest snub of all time. When Beth told me this morning, I was like, “yeah, that sounds about right” and went on about my morning routine. But when I had a free minute, I logged on to Twitter and saw that people, especially white women, were losing their minds at the snub. I couldn’t help but find it incredibly funny, and I quipped that it was making my heart grow like the Grinch’s does when the Whos sing on Christmas.
But Sa’iyda, how could you be so cruel? It’s like you didn’t even understand what the movie was about!
Lookie here folks, if you’ve ever read any of my work, you know that I’m absolutely a feminist, but I also believe in intersectionality. I believe that Barbie as an entity is feminist: I wrote a whole Substack post about it.
I finally got to see the movie when it dropped on HBO Max, and I knew within the first 10 minutes that I wasn’t its target audience. Sure, you can have Issa Rae play President Barbie, Ncuti Gatwa as hot Ken, and Hari Nef as Dr. Barbie, but it’s all lip service. The only kind of feminism that Barbie teaches is the post Trump brand of White Feminism that has permeated mainstream pop culture since 2016. As someone who has been actively railing against that brand of feminism since 2017, I can’t get behind it. Why does Weird Barbie have to be the dyke who has been outcast from Barbieland? Why are the only two shoes she can wear a Birkenstock or a pump? What about a sensible pair of rubber soled shoes someone’s Nana wears? You can steal the dyke anthem “Closer to Fine” but you can’t show that femmes are part of queer culture too?
Also, if the movie was supposed to be about Barbie, WHY WAS THERE SO MUCH KEN?! He didn’t need to learn about the patriarchy to teach Barbie a lesson about being a woman. You want to make a speech about how hard it is to be a woman but then you ignore all of the intersections of what that actually looks like for most women? All Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach did was push their white feminist agenda onto millions of impressionable minds.
Greta Gerwig did a solid job as a director, but she didn’t reinvent the wheel or do anything life changing. Barbie is an easy movie to direct honestly. Especially because she wrote the screenplay and knew exactly the world she created. She made the world look exactly as you’d expect it to. We’ve all seen the Dream House, the Corvette. And I think Margot Robbie is talented, but she’s always just playing variations of the same character, and that character is a variation of Margot Robbie. I will say, I’m excited to see what Barbie outfit she’s going to wear to the Oscars, and I will miss her recreating those classic looks.
Barbie got the Oscar noms it deserved…kind of. I think Ryan Gosling did a fine job as Ken. Was it an Oscar worthy performance? Absolutely not. I think his spot should have been given to Charles Melton in May December, but the Academy loves Gosling, so there ya go. I think it deserved a nom for adapted screenplay. Whether people like it or not, Barbie as a character is IP — there are dozens of shows and movies built around the character, and while this is an original story, for her, it’s not a wholly original concept. I don’t think either song deserved a nom; if any song was going to get one, it should have been “Dance the Night Away” by Dua Lipa. Billie Eilish already has an (undeserved) Oscar, and I don’t understand why people love her so much. America Ferrara was fine, and I think it was smart of them to nominate the Latinx woman if they were only giving it two acting noms. I don’t think she’s seriously in contention for the award though. Not when Da’Vine Joy Randolph has been the darling of awards season.
Whether people want to believe it or not, Barbie isn’t art, it’s a commercial movie. Barbie is to the girls, gays and theys what a Marvel movie is to the bros. Occasionally, the Oscars will throw a Best Picture nomination the way of an incredibly popular blockbuster; Black Panther got one in 2018, and animated films Beauty and the Beast, Up, and Toy Story 3 have been nominated. Commercial films can occasionally break through the noise, but with the Academy expanding Best Picture to 10 nominees, it’s a lot easier to allow that to happen. I think the Best Picture award as it stands is kind of bs anyway. The producer is the one who wins the award, not the people who worked tirelessly to pull it off. Of course Warner Bros. is going to get a Best Picture nom for Barbie, it was the biggest movie of 2023. That doesn’t mean people see any sort of artistic value in it.
The response I saw all day was completely in line with the brand of feminism put forward by Barbie. White women, the same ones who had been praising the movie all summer, sharing the America Ferrera speech on social media, were falling apart at the idea of the Academy not seeing the value in the movie they had. How dare you not nominate Greta? What about Margot? Oh look, the man got nominated for an Oscar in a movie for and by women (spoiler alert, it was co-written BY A MAN.) WHATEVER HAPPENED TO FEMINISM?!
Their reactions led Ryan Gosling to release a statement taking the Academy to task for the alleged snubs when he should be happy celebrating his mediocre performance. America Ferrera got nominated for her first Oscar and all anyone wants to ask her about is her opinions on her white co-star not getting a nomination.
As they acted like their lives were ending, I of course thought about all of the performances that didn’t get nominations and should have over Barbie. Fantasia Barrino was incredible in The Color Purple, but she was completely snubbed. She acted her ass off in that role, and she had to sing for her life. Awards season has done her dirty the whole fucking time. What about the movie Origin? It was completely shut out during awards season. Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor wasn’t even part of any conversations. Ava DuVernay wasn’t brought up in any circles for directing.
In all of the talk about Barbie’s “snubs,” I barely saw praise for first time nominees like Sterling K. Brown or Danielle Brooks. There are three women of color nominated for Best Supporting Actress, which is half the category! Colman Domingo (who is wonderful in Rustin, even if the movie is meh) and Jodie Foster (who I don’t think deserved a nomination for Nyad) made history by being the first openly gay actors to get Oscar nominations for playing gay characters. Lily Gladstone is the first Indigenous actor to ever be nominated for an Oscar. I know I shouldn’t be surprised that in 2024 we’re still having historic firsts, but here we are.
Look, I’m not saying that misogyny isn’t a thing that’s at play here. It absolutely is. The Academy is guilty of a lot of things for sure. But that’s not what the outrage is really coming from. If the white woman everyone loves had been the only woman nominated instead of a white woman who directed a movie no one saw, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation. None of the white women who are angry about Greta Gerwig’s lack of a nomination care about the women who aren’t her. It’s white feminism 101: we only care about us and the things that preserve the way of life we’re accustomed to, and fuck everything that doesn’t fit into that box. Even women who claim to be “progressive” will revert right back to white feminism when the option is put in front of them. You know what? I am so fucking tired of the bs.
It’s more than time for the Academy to have a reckoning. I’ve been saying this for damn near 10 years. They need to go back to the old days when the standards were good work and not “prestige” or a very narrow view of what people consider “art.” They need to widen the lanes for those who aren’t white men to get the same opportunities as white men. Women of color need to be nominated for roles that don’t see them playing sidekick to white people or that are steeped in pain. But white women also need to recognize that when their outrage is only reserved white women, they don’t actually want change. I said this to Beth and I’ll say it here: if the white women who were enraged by the alleged Barbie snubs actually used that outrage to actually uplift other women the way they say they do, we could change the fucking world.
This is the difference in a womanist and a feminist: we only care about us and the things that preserve the way of life we’re accustomed to, and fuck everything that doesn’t fit into that box. And, I appreciate you highlighting the difference. Very well done, thanks for this.
Really excellent writing.