I Loved Barbie But I'm Not Apoplectic About Its Best Actress and Director Snubs

It’s crazy to think that Israeli schlock merchants Cannon had the rights to Mattel and Marvel’s intellectual properties in the 1980s and all that came of it were poorly received, low-budget adaptations of Masters of the Universe and Captain America. 

Needless to say, we never got to experience a Barbie movie masterminded by the people who brought you The Happy Hooker Goes to Hollywood, Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo and Death Wish 3. 

That’s probably for the best but I think Charles Bronson would have made for a terrific, if unconventional Ken. 

The Cannon version of Barbie wasn’t going to clean up at the Academy Awards. Why would it? It’d literally be a movie based on a popular line of fashion dolls for children. Not exactly the Holocaust or mental illness when it comes to award-friendly subject matter. 

Or at least that’s what you might have thought three years ago, before Greta Gerwig’s wildly overachieving Barbie movie became, in tandem with Oppenheimer, the biggest story in all of film, if not pop culture as a whole, this year.

Barbie was a massive pop culture phenomenon, the kind that people will still be talking about fifty years from now. 

Despite its roots as, again, a movie about a popular toy line for children Barbie was treated as not just a very good movie and a very entertaining movie but as a movie that was also important and a movie that mattered. 

Barbie found an audience that Hollywood had never catered to before: women. It turns out that there are a LOT of women and they apparently get off on seeing themselves represented onscreen. 

Greta Gerwig’s surprise mega-blockbuster didn’t get a pat on the head and a cookie and condescending praise for being good for a movie about a toy; it was received as a great movie and a movie of substance and a film that manages to Trojan horse all manner of feminist subversion into a crowd-pleaser for the whole family. 

It was so rapturously received that the question wasn’t whether this fun comedy based on a popular toy line would be nominated for Academy Awards but rather how many Academy Awards and in which categories. 

It brings me no joy to report that Barbie was snubbed. Oh sure, it picked up eight pity nominations in unimportant categories like Best Picture, Best Screenplay, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Production Design, Costume Design and Best Song but Margot Robbie did not get nominated for Best Actress and Gerwig did not a nod for Best Director. 

This has created a great outcry. Barbie must be the first film in history to be nominated for eight Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Screenplay, Best Song and two acting nods and still be considered screwed by the Academy. 

I want to state upfront that I loved Barbie and think that Robbie should have been nominated for Best Actress. It’s a phenomenal performance and a tonally tricky one that requires her to likable and relatable while being quite possibly the most beautiful woman in the history of the universe. 

It’s an iconic performance from a perfectly cast movie star who is also a terrific actress. I similarly think that Gerwig should have been nominated for Best Director. She was the maestro who put everything together and created something that was loved the world over and will be for decades to come. 

At the same time I am not terribly sympathetic to people who are apoplectic about Robbie and Gerwig not getting nominated for Best Actress and Best Picture respectively for the following reasons: 

1. Margot Robbie and Greta Gerwig both got nominated for Academy Awards in major categories for Barbie

I’m sure Gerwig and Robbie wanted to be nominated for Best Director and Best Actress but as consolation prizes go, nominations for Best Screenplay and Best Film aren’t too bad. 

People were consequently upset that Gerwig and Robbie were only nominated for one Academy Award for Barbie when they thought they deserved two each. 

2. Barbie has received every kind of validation, including a Best Picture Oscar nomination, so it seems a little strange to think of it as being snubbed or robbed or looked over 

Barbie deserves all of the extraordinary success it has received and I think I can say without hyperbole that it’s one of the most successful projects in all of entertainment. I’m not even limiting it to movies; across the pop culture few pieces of entertainment have exploded the way that Barbie did. A plethora of Oscar nominations is just the frosting on a big-ass cake. 

3. Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie are young and talented and coming off a movie that made a billion a half dollars. They’ll have plenty more chances to be nominated for Oscars 

It’d be different if Gerwig or Robbie were old or sick or if this was an anomaly in an otherwise unexceptional career but Gerwig and Robbie are young. They’re ambitious. They’re talented. They’ll make lots of great movies in the years and decades ahead and hopefully get nominated, and win Academy Awards for them. 

The Big WhoopNathan Rabin