Like a lot of cinephiles, I can’t help but get excited for Oscar nominations morning, seeing which of my favorites of the year will get to be celebrated on Hollywood’s most glamorous stage – but that excitement doesn’t come without a little bit of anxiety. There’s a reason, after all, why the “snubs” conversation quickly becomes one of the biggest of the moment. As much as we love to cheer on our favorites, we also prepare to wring our hands over which of those were overlooked.
But you know what I wasn’t worried about? Barbie. If there were any shoe-ins that I expected, it was that Greta Gerwig would be recognized for her work in wrangling Barbie’s layered examination of what it means to be a woman while also making the film funny and palatable enough for wide audiences who were drawn in by the IP. And Margot Robbie, too, had to get nominated for a nuanced performance that had her going from picture-perfect doll to a complex, confused character breaking apart at the seams (in a movie she also produced, no less).
We didn’t have to worry about that. The Academy would get this one right. They had to with the year that Barbie has had and all the accolades that Gerwig and Robbie have had foisted onto them in the meantime. It was a given, right? Right?
Maybe that’s my fault for overestimating the Academy.
Barbie, of course, wasn’t snubbed at large. It got a spot in the coveted Best Picture category, Adapted Screenplay, Original Song for both “I’m Just Ken” and “What Was I Made For?,” Production Design, and Supporting Actor and Actress for Ryan Gosling and America Ferrera, respectively.
But I’d be lying if I didn’t feel a certain pang of disappointment when Gerwig’s name wasn’t read among the Best Director nominees during this morning’s livestream. It feels like more than a snub, more than something that can be brushed aside with the usual excuse of “Well, you know, there were just so many great potential nominees this year!”
Because, as I mentioned, Barbie wasn’t forgotten. Hell, Gerwig and Robbie are still nominated in other categories: Gerwig for co-writing the screenplay for Barbie, and Robbie as a producer in Best Picture. But for Gerwig to be left out of the Best Director category specifically – a category that has long been dominated by men, and would’ve been this year if not for the lone woman nominee of Anatomy of a Fall’s Justine Triet – seems like the most symbolic way to prove Barbie’s exact point.
Barbie, to put it at its most broad, was about femininity and all the joys and struggles that come along with it, the external pressures that wreak havoc on women’s internal lives, as masterfully portrayed by both Robbie and Ferrara. It’s about the endless pursuit of perfection in a world where it feels like it’ll never be enough – or maybe, just enough for a man to get credit for it.
But I feel I can’t do the movie’s themes justice better than Gerwig and co-writer Noah Baumbach did in their own script, emotionally conveyed by Ferrara at one of the movie’s emotional climaxes. So I’ll let this excerpt from her character’s monologue do the talking:
“Always stand out and always be grateful. But never forget that the system is rigged. So find a way to acknowledge that but also always be grateful. You have to never get old, never be rude, never show off, never be selfish, never fall down, never fail, never show fear, never get out of line. It's too hard! It's too contradictory and nobody gives you a medal or says thank you! And it turns out in fact that not only are you doing everything wrong, but also everything is your fault.
I'm just so tired of watching myself and every single other woman tie herself into knots so that people will like us. And if all of that is also true for a doll just representing women, then I don't even know.”
To be clear, Barbie wasn’t made by one person, but it’d be ignorant to say that a massive part of its success doesn’t come from Gerwig herself. It was Gerwig who deftly moved us from the plastic perfection of Barbie Land to the disillusioned streets of Los Angeles; who helped evoke both heartbeat and humor from actors like Robbie, Gosling, and Ferrera; whose careful hand ushered a script that had us laughing at the shenanigans of a Ken-versus-Ken war one minute and sobbing at the complicated plight of womanhood the next.
While, obviously, just due to sheer numbers, every Best Picture nominee can’t get a Best Director nomination, Barbie was a massive achievement from a directorial standpoint specifically. Gerwig walked an impossible tightrope, balancing not only existential ideas with mainstream-friendly entertainment, but also the reverence we have for Barbie herself with her complicated legacy.
Or, as my colleague Alyssa Mora put it much more eloquently in her review for IGN: “This is Gerwig’s power: to take an ageless icon of femininity and remind us that as much as she defined us, we will forever continue to define her.”
And it’s impossible to judge art by any specific measurement, but with just about every metric we have, Gerwig knocked it out of the park. Critics not only loved Barbie (the movie sits at 88% on Rotten Tomatoes), but it became a full-on cultural phenomenon, grossing $1.4 billion to become the highest-grossing movie of 2023. It, along with the related phenomenon that was Barbenheimer, got crowds excited for a theatrical event again, something that has happened only a handful of times since the COVID-19 pandemic hobbled the industry.
But, while the Oscars will inevitably draw a bigger crowd because of Barbie’s inclusion in the nominees, the female director behind it will not have a shot at a trophy. The words of Gerwig’s own script ring true again, maybe a little too literally: “It's too contradictory and nobody gives you a medal or says thank you.”
I’d also be remiss in not mentioning that there’s a special kind of irony behind Gosling getting nominated while Robbie isn’t. Don’t get me wrong: Gosling absolutely deserves to be recognized (I still laugh when I think about his delivery of “SUBLIME!”) but it was Robbie’s delicate progression from perfect doll to conflicted woman that carried the film’s emotional heft. If that didn’t work, none of the movie would.
The fact that the Oscars have historically been less-than-generous to female directors only adds insult to injury. Gerwig isn’t even the only woman director who was a viable candidate for this year’s awards; Past Lives filmmaker Celine Song was overlooked, too, for her stunning directorial debut that gorgeously portrayed some of the most poignant parts of long-held relationships and the longing that comes with the human condition.
But, in the end, both were snubbed, and the Academy will continue a long, unfortunate trend. To put that trend in context: In the history of the Oscars, only eight women have been nominated for Best Director, with only three taking home the trophy to date.
Maybe the Academy voters were just like me and assumed Gerwig was an easy shoo-in, thus leading them to write in other nominees. Maybe the directing lineup really was that good. Maybe I’m being ungenerous.
But after decades and decades and decades of the Academy overlooking women specifically in the director category – well, it gets harder every year to write off the excuses.
Alex Stedman is a Senior News Editor with IGN, overseeing entertainment reporting. When she's not writing or editing, you can find her reading fantasy novels or playing Dungeons & Dragons.
