Barbie wasn’t revolutionary. Greta Gerwig, Margot Robbie Oscar snub isn’t a feminist issue

Barbie was a mediocre film that became a global sensation after a year-long publicity blitzkrieg.

A still from Barbie The Movie | Twitter

The outrage over Barbie’s supposed Oscar snub is baffling. Greta Gerwig was not in the best director category, and the movie’s lead actor Margot Robbie was noticeably absent from the Academy’s Best Actress list of nominees. But that’s understandable. Barbie may have collected over one billion dollars worldwide, but let’s be clear—it’s a two-hour-long Mattel commercial masquerading as a film. 

Gerwig and Robbie’s omission is not an attack on feminism as much as it is an acknowledgment of a bad movie ridden with plot holes. America Ferrera was also not deserving of a nomination in the Best Supporting Actress category. Her character was underwritten. 

Barbie was a ‘mid’ film and became a global sensation after a year-long publicity blitzkrieg.  Without a 360-degree campaign, the movie wouldn’t have been the cultural phenomenon it is today. And for being a culture-shifting film, it definitely deserved nomination as Best Picture—which it got—but not Best Director. 

It’s not sexist

In a year when native American actor, Lily Gladstone, is the favourite to win the Best Actress award for her performance in Killers of the Flower Moon (2023), the outrage over the exclusion of Gerwig and Robbie is nothing but ‘white’ feminism. The privileged Karens of the world are arguing over it. But Barbie, a movie about a ‘man’s world’, has received eight Oscar nominations including Best Picture, Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress. 

Remind me, did the Academy nominate a man over Margot Robbie in Best Actress category for their decision to become sexist in nature?

It is preposterous to say that the Academy has shown exactly what Barbie was depicting– a patriarchal world. We don’t need to cite this alleged snub at the Oscars to show us that we live in a patriarchal society. Only eight women have been nominated as Best Directors so far, and only two have won in the history of the awards.

Gerwig deservedly got nominated as Best Director in 2018 for Lady Bird, and the actual snub that everyone should be furious about is that she was overlooked for Little Women (2019). 

There was nothing revolutionary about Barbie. It was at best a pretty film, deserving of an award for best production design—another category in which it has bagged a nomination. Ryan Gosling was arguably the strongest actor in the movie, and he’s been nominated as well in the best actor category. 

I call the film a ‘commercial’ because Mattel, the makers of Barbie (the toy), were also the producers of the film. The film went easy on the toy manufacturer, and the script came across as pre-approved. And no matter how many times Mattel says they didn’t meddle with the script, or that the movie wasn’t made to sell dolls, the fact is that it was part of a revival for a company struggling with sluggish sales. It also helps that Barbie, once discarded as a toxic relic of the past, is now back in conversation. The movie also changed the entire narrative around the doll, catapulting it from a misogynistic toy to a feminist one—and increasing its sales by 25 per cent. 

Why best director 

Barbie is ridden with plot holes—enough to sink the Titanic.  Gerwig completely wasted Will Ferrell in her movie as Mattel CEO. Why was he there? What catastrophe would ravage the world if Barbie continued to be in the real world? What secrets was Mattel hiding? These plot points built up the movie but the climax fell flat. The company men at Mattel are extraneous to the plot.

And how did Ken, in a short period, completely tip the scales of a utopia? How were Barbies, who were running the government, taken over so easily? The reasoning behind this tectonic shift in the Barbie Land wasn’t compelling. 

Robbie’s ‘stereotypical’ Barbie also didn’t spend enough time in the real world to come to appreciate it in the first place. 

Why was her birth in the real world the climax of a film about patriarchy and Barbie’s first encounter with it?

The montage running in the background of singer Billie Eilish’s soul-crushing song ‘What Was I Made For’ was poorly executed and lacked emotional resonance. Especially since the Disney Pixar movie Soul has already delivered a mind-blowing and goosebump-inducing montage portraying the beauty of life through little things. It transformed a character who was initially against living, making them eager to be born on Earth and embrace life.

For these reasons, Barbie proves to be a terrific commercial advertisement and entertaining film. While not warranting recognition for Best Director or Best Actress, it certainly deserves the title of Best Picture.

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