By Rich Lowry
Friday,
January 26, 2024
Sometimes the
universe has a sense of humor.
Could
there be a more amusing coda to the Barbie phenomenon than the
Ken doll, played by Ryan Gosling, getting a Best Supporting Actor nomination,
while Barbie herself, played by Margot Robbie, got snubbed?
The
director Greta Gerwig, too, missed out on the big prize, failing to get a Best
Director nomination.
The
patriarchy strikes again.
Barbie, of course, is
the annoying, occasionally entertaining $1.4 billion feminist parable that was made into an unstoppable
cultural juggernaut last year. In certain circles, if you didn’t like it, you
had to make yourself like it.
According
to the movie’s devotees, Ken’s getting all the glory is something straight out
of the film’s male-dominated dystopia that the Barbie dolls must muster the
courage to resist.
Hillary
Clinton expressed her sympathy on social media for the plight of Robbie and
Gerwig, extremely successful people in one of the highest-profile, most
lucrative industries on the planet.
Ryan
Gosling struck a decidedly apologetic note. “There is no Ken without Barbie,”
he said, “and there is no Barbie movie without Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie,
the two people most responsible for this history-making, globally-celebrated
film.”
If
Gosling wins the Oscar, he will have to give it back, or promise to melt down
the statue.
It’s
not as though the Academy neglected Barbie. The movie got eight
Oscar nominations, including for Best Picture. That it didn’t get two more
doesn’t exactly constitute a cosmic injustice.
As
cinephile Giancarlo Sopo points out, it’s not that unusual for a film to get
nominated for Best Picture, yet not get a Best Director or Best Actress or
Actor nomination. It happened, for instance, to Jaws, Towering
Inferno, and Field of Dreams.
It’s
become an even more common occurrence since the Academy moved to ten Best
Picture nominations, up from the five in the other categories. That means five
people necessarily direct a Best Picture–nominated film and don’t get a Best
Director nomination every year — it’s a matter of math.
This
fate befell Greta Gerwig, but we shouldn’t feel too sorry for her. First, she
was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay for Barbie. Her first two
forays as a solo filmmaker were Lady Bird and Little
Women, and she got nominated for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay
for the former and a Best Adapted Screenplay nomination for the latter.
Suffice
it to say that the Academy likes Greta Gerwig.
As
for Margot Robbie, she is without a doubt a very talented actress and already
has a couple of prior Oscar nominations of her own. It’s true that it’s hard to
see how they could have found anyone better suited to play Barbie. But for the
impossibly gorgeous Robbie to play a perfect-looking plastic doll was not the
most challenging role.
Why
did Gosling get nominated instead? Well, he’s competing in an entirely
different category. And the Academy might have thought he managed to make more
of a limited — indeed, supporting — role. Still, no one is going to mistake his
performance as a supporting actor for, say, Robert De Niro in Godfather
II or Christopher Walken in Deer Hunter.
If Barbie and
its makers and performers are supposed to be privileged over other
possible nominees and winners, it’d lead to perverse results even by
politically correct standards.
It’s
important to remember that all the other nominees who beat out Robbie in the
Best Actress category . . . are women. Robbie was probably bumped for a
nomination by Annette Bening, a 65-year-old actress who plays the marathon
swimmer Diana Nyad, a lesbian, in the movie Nyad. Who’s more
deserving on feminist grounds?
Meanwhile,
if the Academy feels guilted into giving Gerwig the Best Adapted Screenplay
Oscar, it will have to skip over Cord Jefferson, an African American, nominated
for American Fiction.
The
Oscar nominations — inadvertently, to be sure — show that life doesn’t have to
be as simplistic and monochromatic as depicted in Barbie.
For
that, thank you to the Academy.
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