Barbie fans need to stop complaining

Before anyone tries to question my feminist credentials, let me make one thing clear: I quite liked Barbie. I also think Greta Gerwig is a great director. But unfortunately, the film has one of the most obnoxious fanbases of any cultural product, making even Swifties look measured by comparison. Yesterday, following the announcement of the 2024 Academy Award nominations, they showed themselves to be sore winners: not content with society-spanning popularity and box-office dominance, they demand unanimous critical respect – and God help anyone who dares to disagree.

Barbie received eight nominations, including Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Supporting Actress (for America Ferrera) and Best Supporting Actor (for Ryan Gosling.) This is already pretty generous: it’s a fun film and it looks great, but it’s kind of a mess both narratively and thematically, and its blatant commercialism (if that’s a strong enough word to describe what is effectively a long-form advert for Mattel) should preclude it from being considered as a serious work of art. The Barbie fanbase should have been thanking the Academy on their hands and knees for deigning to toss them any nominations at all, but they still weren’t happy. Because Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie are not in the running for Best Director and Best Leading Actress respectively, the story immediately became that the film had been “snubbed”. As the furore gained pace, Ryan Gosling himself rushed out a press release: “To say that I’m disappointed that they are not nominated in their respective categories would be an understatement,” it read.

As many Barbie fans saw it, the irony was simply too delicious. “Let me see if I understand this: the Academy nominated Barbie for Best Picture (eight nominations total) – a film about women being sidelined and rendered invisible in patriarchal structures. But not the women who directed the film. Okay then,” wrote the political commentator Charlotte Clymer, expressing a sentiment which was echoed in scores of viral tweets. “How did voters justify giving Barbie, with its very clear message that women have to dance backwards in heels to get half the validation their male peers get a best picture nom while ignoring the two women who made that picture possible,”, wrote journalist Mary Mcnamara in the LA Times.

It’s not the job of the Academy Awards to validate the themes or message of a particular film. But the fact that Barbie did receive so many nominations is proof that neither Gerwig nor Robbie (who produced it) have been “sidelined and rendered invisible” – it was their project! And if people are annoyed that Ryan Gosling had the most prominent and best-written role in the film, they should direct that complaint towards the people who made it.

It’s stupid to suggest – as scores of people did – that Margot Robbie missed out on a Best Actress nomination due to sexism, considering all of the other contenders were women. Some commenters made a case for a subtler kind of misogyny, arguing that Barbie was deemed too girly, pink, feminine and light-hearted to be taken seriously. But the idea that these qualities are constitutive of womanhood is itself deeply patronising – there are plenty of women filmmakers making serious, challenging films (many of them without ever receiving a nod from the Oscars), and plenty of women who enjoy them. The sharpest critics of Barbie, and particularly of its feminism, have largely been women, and some of its most obsequious defenders are men. Whether you like it is not a litmus test for how progressive you are.

“If only Barbie had done a little time as a sex worker. Or barely survived becoming the next victim in a mass murder plot. Or stood accused of shoving Ken out of the Dream House’s top window,” wrote McNamara. It stands to reason that films with more intense and dramatic themes will give rise to performances considered Oscar-worthy. But it’s the reference to Killers of the Flower Moon here – a film about a real-life case of genocide against an indigenous community – which feels particularly jarring. The Academy Awards have been running for almost a century, and this is the first year that an indigenous woman from the US (Lily Gladstone) has been in the running for Best Leading Actress. This historic moment has been dwarfed by a narrative about the disrespect being shown towards Barbie and its white lead. This is being framed as a social justice campaign, but on whose behalf?

Lots of deserving women were snubbed this year (Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman, who were both incredible in May December, come to mind, and Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla was, in my opinion, a better film than Barbie), without attracting anywhere near the same level of outrage. It’s incoherent, if not disingenuous, to only consider the exclusion of women a problem when they’re involved in the making of mainstream blockbusters. Like any award ceremony, the Oscars can be arbitrary and unfair, and its voters often make terrible decisions. We don’t have to depend on them to validate our tastes, or our politics – they can’t take away that precious feeling you had when America Ferrera made her monologue about being a woman. Feminism will survive the “snubbing” of Barbie, just as Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie will continue to be two of the most powerful people in Hollywood. Neither of them are so thin-skinned that they need us to defend them.