With the 2024 Oscar nominees having finally been named earlier this week, the subsequent narratives have now taken flight, but none quite as explosive as the one that Hillary Clinton felt compelled to weigh in on.
You know what I’m talking about: the absences of both Margot Robbie and Greta Gerwig from the list of nominees for Best Actress and Best Director for Barbie, respectively—the same two absences that have had the internet in an absolute uproar these last couple of days.
Ryan Gosling, who scored a nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his role in the film, has already made his thoughts on the matter clear, and now America Ferrera, who will represent Barbie from the Best Supporting Actress category, has joined the conversation, as well. In a recent interview with Deadline, the actress weighed in on Gerwig’s and Robbie’s absences with about the sentiment one would expect:
“They’re my girls, and I want to see their incredible, amazing work celebrated. They made history, they set a new bar. They not only broke box office records, but made something that resonated around the globe, and the impact of what they made is, and will continue to be felt in our culture. I think I join a lot of people in wanting to see them acknowledged for that.”
Now, it would be easy to call out the injustice of these absences, and it would also be mostly correct, but it might be more apt to take this opportunity to take aim at awards season culture as a whole.
For instance, to say that Barbie and the creative mavericks behind it haven’t been celebrated or acknowledged reduces the parameters of their impact to the validation of the Academy, which is a problem for a handful of reasons, one of them being the simple fact that all the nominations in the world wouldn’t come close to matching the sensational, soulfully-nutritious cultural significance that Barbie has already doused the world in, and to suggest otherwise would frankly be grossly ignorant.
More importantly, however, it suggests that in order for Barbie’s accomplishments to be recognized, someone else’s accomplishment needs to be downplayed. Perhaps, then, it’s time for the competition aspect of the Academy Awards to start being viewed as it really is: a fun novelty that serves as the Super Bowl equivalent for us movie lovers rather than a pseudo-supreme metric by which certain achievements are given more value than others.
Indeed, which director should have been snubbed in favor of Gerwig, and which actress should have been snubbed in favor of Robbie? Those questions are both rhetorical, of course, because if Barbie were a person, she’d absolutely reject the notion of someone needing to be snubbed so that her greatness could be on full display; indeed, she’d lift everybody up with her, regardless of how unfathomably remarkable—and, dare I say, uncategorizable—her own accomplishments were.
Continue to buy into the “the Academy missed the point of Barbie” narrative all you want, but I invite you to instead consider if Barbie ever really needed the Academy to understand it. Statuettes collect dust, but ideas live forever.
(featured image: Warner Bros. Pictures)
