Oscar honors Ken, overlooks Barbie

Opinion editor’s note: Star Tribune Opinion publishes a mix of national and local commentaries online and in print each day. To contribute, click here.

•••

When the 2024 Oscar nominations were announced Tuesday morning, the snubs of the two most prominent women involved in “Barbie” — director Greta Gerwig and lead actress Margot Robbie — became the breakout story.

The top-grossing film of 2023, passing the $1 billion mark worldwide, is based on the imagined life and times of the iconic Mattel doll. A cultural phenomenon on its own terms, “Barbie,” along with “Oppenheimer,” became half of an unusually thoughtful summer blockbuster duo released on the same day in July (“Barbenheimer”): nothing to sneeze at.

As it turns out, the internet had strong opinions about the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ announcement.

“Let me see if I understand this: the Academy nominated ‘Barbie’ for Best Picture (eight nominations total) — a film about women being sidelined and rendered invisible in patriarchal structures — but not the woman who directed the film. Okay then,” read a viral post by writer Charlotte Clymer on X, formerly Twitter.

The film wasn’t completely shut out — it was nominated for best picture, while Gerwig picked up a nomination with Noah Baumbach for adapted screenplay. Ryan Gosling was nominated for supporting actor and America Ferrera for supporting actress. But the fact that Gosling was tabbed for his towheaded Ken, who discovers the idea of patriarchy and then attempts to dominate Barbieland, before Robbie’s character destroys gender-based oppression, was too much for some to take. “We’re actually doing patriarchy very well,” writer Jodi Lipper wrote in an Instagram story, quoting a Ken line from the film.

(In a statement released yesterday, Gosling wrote, “To say that I’m disappointed that they are not nominated in their respective categories would be an understatement.” And in a statement to Variety, Ferrera said she was “incredibly disappointed that they weren’t nominated.”)

Indeed, because “Barbie” functions as a commentary on sexism and a metacommentary on its own place in feminist discourse, the movie itself was the first place some of its fans reached to express their outrage over the snubs.

“Nominating Ken but not Barbie is literally the plot of the movie,” novelist Brad Meltzer wrote in a thread, above an animated image of Robbie, as Barbie, dancing and saying, “Do you guys ever think about dying?”

“No but seriously ... this could have been a storyline straight out of the Barbie movie,” reads the caption on a popular TikTok post from this morning.

By Wednesday, the outcry had grown loud enough that even Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state, weighed in.

“Greta & Margot, While it can sting to win the box office but not take home the gold, your millions of fans love you. You’re both so much more than Kenough,” the 2016 Democratic nominee for president wrote on X.

Particularly galling for some were the nominations garnered by Gerwig and Robbie’s “Barbenheimer” male counterparts, Christopher Nolan and Cillian Murphy, for their work on “Oppenheimer.”

“greta gerwig & margot robbie were as crucial to barbie’s critical & commercial success as nolan & cillian murphy were to oppenheimer’s - imagine the uproar if one or both of those men had been snubbed! it’s wild how barbie is ‘oscar worthy,’ but not the women who made it so,” writer Zoë Rose Bryant posted on X.

The snub comes after Golden Globes host Jo Koy drew groans during his monologue for comparing the source material for “Oppenheimer” (“a 721-page Pulitzer Prize-winning book”) with that of “Barbie” (“a plastic doll with big boobies”).

For now, those hoping the director and star of “Barbie” will be recognized for their work will have to wish that the musical version of the film the two teased earlier this month comes to fruition. There’s always the Tonys.