It was the Oscars snub heard ’round the world: When nominations for the 96th annual Academy Awards were announced on Tuesday, Greta Gerwig’s Barbie—you know, that film you’ve been hearing about for the entirety of your adult life—came away with a total of eight noms, including for best picture and best adapted screenplay, but Gerwig herself wasn’t nominated in the best director category. Margot Robbie’s turn as Stereotypical Barbie was also ignored, in favor of nods for America Ferrera and Ryan Gosling in the supporting categories. “To say that I’m disappointed that they are not nominated in their respective categories would be an understatement,” the latter wrote of Gerwig and Robbie in a statement.
As an unreserved Barbie stan myself, I totally get where Gosling is coming from; not only is it gentlemanly in the extreme of him to look out for his colleagues, but it is sort of dystopian (and very in line with the message of Barbie!) to see Gosling—the film’s most prominent male actor—among the two performers singled out. Was he flawless as Ken? Absolutely, but the whole movie is about female friendship and feminism—a message that it seems the Academy still desperately needs to hear, given that Anatomy of a Fall helmer Justine Triet is only the eighth woman ever to be nominated for the Oscar for best director.
Gosling isn’t the only person jarred by the Oscars‘ Barbie imbroglio, as no less an authority on gender-based snubbing than Hillary Clinton weighed in on Wednesday with a message of support for Gerwig and Robbie. “While it can sting to win the box office but not take home the gold,” Clinton wrote on X, “your millions of fans love you. You’re both so much more than Kenough.”
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Maybe it’s the sideways equating of Barbie s Oscars upset with the 2016 presidential election (respectfully, let’s get a grip!), or the fact that the Barbie press tour and PR campaign were omnipresent enough to permeate seemingly every moment of last summer, but I’m a little bit…over it? And that’s as someone who genuinely considers Gerwig to be one of the best directors of our time, and who thought Robbie s performance in Barbie was stunningly good. But it’s not as if no women from the movie were nominated: Ferrera, whose monologue about the challenges of modern womanhood was arguably the emotional crux of the movie, is up for best supporting actress. No, she didn’t literally play a Barbie, but isn’t her accomplishment still worth celebrating?
While the Oscars (and award shows in general) definitely still have a long way to go on the gender-parity front, it should also be noted that this is the first year in the Academy’s history that a Native American actress—Lily Gladstone, who stole the show in Killers of the Flower Moon—is nominated for a major acting award. Gerwig and Robbie’s shutout is definitely disappointing, but maybe we’d all be better off if we took our collective eye off Barbie for one second and instead focused our attention on rewarding stories like the ones that Gladstone, Poor Things‘s Emma Stone and Nyad’s Annette Benning are telling onscreen. After all, why should we keep our cinematic ambitions doll-sized?
