“Barbie” and the Oscars: Let’s Get More Precise About the “Snub”

The sexism that cut Greta Gerwig out of a “Best Directer” nomination is many-layered.

It’s been years since I’ve seen the term “misogynist” deployed so intensely and repeatedly, both by people enraged at the Academy for leaving Greta Gerwig off the list of nominated directors, and by critics challenging the outcry (as in “misogynist” said with rolled eyes.) That right there should tell you it’s not a very useful word in the context of this particular “snub” (as many headlines termed it.)

I avoid the term, usually. First off, despite feminists’ attempts to theorize it more precisely, it carries a popular meaning—“woman-hating”—that is both too extreme and too forgiving. There’s a huge amount of sexist thinking that doesn’t involve hatred of women but is no less damaging to us. And when the term is flung at everything from the Salem witch trials and rape to sexist slurs and exclusions, it makes it easy for every charge of “misogyny” to be dismissed as just the usual feminist ranting. At the same time, it allows others to differentiate themselves from the brutes (“I don’t hate women. I just think Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie didn’t deserve the nomination”) and avoid thinking about the more subtle forms of sexism in the Academy’s choices.

I think we learn a lot more about how sexism operates when we avoid big, broad strokes and get lean, mean and specific. Which is what I’m going to try to do here—starting by not glomming together Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie. Margot Robbie did a great job, but to my mind, understanding why she wasn’t nominated is parasitic on first understanding why Gerwig wasn’t. And the Gerwig exclusion is the onion whose layers I’ll try to peel back here.

Layer 1: The Snob Effect. Nominations for director (unlike the nominations for Best Picture, which are decided by all members of the Academy) are chosen by the directing branch. And yes, three-quarters of that branch are men. But for the moment, let’s look beyond their gender (I’ll get back to it) and note that both the men and the (vastly out-numbered) women in the directing branch are likely to have been to film school, where they may have learned to worship the auteurs (let’s face it, overwhelmingly male and many French and Scandinavian) from both the history of film and more recent generations. These folks are likely to fancy themselves more serious than the average Academy member about the “craft” of directing, more easily dazzled by both technical innovation and “profound” ideas, and suspicious of “popular” tastes. The kind of folks Pauline Kael frequently complained about in her reviews. Kael appreciated pleasure—unlike the critic I discussed in my first stack on “Barbie.” That was The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane, and here’s a taste of his snide condescension:

“You come away with a head full of bits: interruptions that are sprinkled over the plot like glitter. Moping Barbies tend to watch the BBC’s “Pride and Prejudice” for the seventh time, we hear, whereupon the screen fills with a clip of Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy. Wackier still is a scene in which Barbie complains of no longer being pretty; a voice-over (Helen Mirren) butts in to point out that hiring Margot Robbie to play unpretty is poor casting. This earned a laugh when I saw the movie, but you have to ask: Who’s it for? Will young girls return to the film again and again, as they did to “Frozen” (2013)? ….Maybe the movie is for Greta Gerwig. And, by extension, for anyone as super-smart as her—former Barbiephiles, preferably, who have wised up and put away childish things. Nobody else would even attempt to meld a feminist colloquium with a plug for a chunk of plastic, and, if the result is a deep disappointment after “Little Women,” perhaps depth is the wrong thing to ask for.”

Notice the swipe both at “feminist colloquium” and (implicitly) the little girls who love the “chunk of plastic.” Had Lane actually talked to a little girl instead of mocking their culture, he’d know they are more savvy and instinctively “political” than Lane gives them credit for. (He obviously doesn’t know that Weird Barbie [Kate McKinnon] with her chopped up hair and drawn-on face is what little girls actually do to their Barbies a lot of the time, in addition to arranging lots of Barbie-on-Barbie sex.) And yes, in answer to his question, those young girls did love the movie.

What Lane calls the bits “sprinkled over the plot like glitter” are a big part of what make the movie fun—and so, so recognizable to us girls (and some boys, too—but not Mr. Lane.) Don’t you just want to smack Anthony for being such a little snot-nose about glitter? His review is as drenched—with condescending, gendered metaphors and images—as Colin Firth’s clinging, water-soaked shirt is with masculine Eros. And the Helen Mirren voiceover was among the funniest moments in the movie, which like many others, broke through the fourth wall of the main script to poke playfully at the more serious themes.

Before the Academy nominations for Directing were announced, we got a clue that “Barbie” wasn’t going to be taken seriously by those who value their professional standards—in this case, the writers, who ruled “that Gerwig and Noah Baumbach’s inspired screenplay belonged in the adapted category (where it received a nomination) and not original. Whether it was tone-deaf to the script's inventiveness or just foolishly rigid, the executive committee of the Academy's Writers Branch said that the movie was based on a previously existing character, that is, a doll.”

It was a stretch, to say the least, to consign “Barbie” to the “adapted” category. Can you imagine either of these lines on the box of the DreamHouses being sold at “Toys R Us”?

Of course, I had to check the list to make sure I had my receipts in order. And discovered that the only other adapted screenplay involving a doll—“Toy Story 3”—wasn’t actually based on any toy itself, but on previous Toy Story movies. Year after year the “adapted screenplay” category has (appropriately) been dominated by movies based on plays, novels, and memoirs. “Barbie” was only the third time a “previously existing character” from pop culture was included in this category (the others were The Joker and Wolverine), while numerous “previously existing characters” and events from history—Gandhi, The Titanic, Patton, Chariots of Fire, Milk, The King’s Speech—not only made it to “Original Screenplay” but won. They were about serious people, of course, not a “chunk of plastic.”

Then there was the Golden Globes, where Barbie failed to win best comedy or musical but walked away with the cheesy, newly-invented award for cinematic box office achievement, a consolation prize for being popular and making money.

The Golden Globes really ticked me off, and I shot off a furious Facebook rant, full of angry shouts (in social media land, that would be CAPITAL LETTERS):

“Sure looks like they created a special new category just so they could give an award to “Barbie” and shower the REAL awards on the guys.

In her very special category—called “Cinematic and Box Office Achievement” (read: MADE A SHIT TON OF MONEY) “Barbie” competed against “Guardians of the Galaxy,” “John Wick,” “Mission Impossible”, “Spider Man,” “SuperMario Brothers” and the Taylor Swift movie. (Oh yes, and “Oppenheimer,” which took all the REAL awards, and was only in this category because of “Barbie’s” box-office coat-tails—known as “Barbenheimer”)

Or maybe they put Oppy in there with Barbs so we wouldn’t be able to say this was a category that, despite appearances to the contrary, should be taken SERIOUSLY. Because, of course, we wouldn’t want anyone to think Greta Gerwig’s inventive, hilarious, but slyly subversive movie wasn’t being taken seriously. I mean, just look at the rest of the nominees. (Nothing against any of them, but REALLY??? In the same category as “Barbie”???)

Oh yeah, it also got “best song” for “What Was I Made For?” The answer, clearly, is “to look pretty and entertain little girls while the boys make bombs.”

“Barbie”’s commercial popularity, while earning that “box office achievement” award, was at the same time scorned for being the handmaid of the capitalist system—as in Anthony Lane’s scorn for the film’s “plug” for Barbie merch. Sure, Mattel produced it and are selling zillions of dolls from the movie. But a deal was structured so “Gerwig and Baumbach would be left alone to write what they wanted.” (“which was really fucking hard to do,” Robbie has said. ) No execs looking over their shoulders or red-lining the script. And it shows.

And why does “Barbie” come in for special criticism here? Has Anthony Lane ever been in “Toys R Us”? The unusual thing is not how many dolls this movie is selling, but that, unlike “Braveheart” and other cinema celebrations of macho that have had tons of merchandise tie-ins, it’s being held against the movie.

And hey—do you remember who won the award for Best Direction the year of “Braveheart”? It was Mel Gibson—for “Braveheart.”

Layer 2: The Trivializing of Girl Culture

When women began to produce their biographies of famous women during the Victorian era, they were derided as “sentimental, “gossipy”, “minute,” “trifling,” “twaddling,” “amusing” and “tiddle-tattle” and disdainfully dismissed as being interested in “domestic” matters such as dress, diet, education and manners. When male historians got into such details, however, it became “social and material history.”  Thomas Macaulay (1848, History of England) was enthusiastically praised for tackling “domestic and everyday life” and  “the revolutions which have taken place in dress, furniture, repasts, and public amusements.”

Macaulay’s social history was viewed as a welcome “expansion” of the domain of the historian. But those that focused on women’s lives—even if that of royalty—was seen as a specialized, miniaturizing focus. Women writers were lumped together as the work of “literary ladies”—and sometimes, even the books themselves were materially linked to “women’s sphere”: Margaret Oliphant, who wrote books herself, disses the Strickland’s volumes on the lives of queens as “a shower of pretty books in red and blue, gilded and illustrated, light and dainty and personal, that fall upon us from her hands.” (From The Creation of Anne Boleyn)

Could it be that Anthony Lane’s derision over a “chunk of plastic” is because the plastic has been made into a little girl’s toy? Not a Superman or Marvel action figure. Not a Batmobile. Not a science kit that lets little boys blow up shit to their heart’s content.

It’s pretty interesting, I think, that the only woman to be awarded “Best Director” was for a movie about war. (Kathryn Bigelow, for “The Hurt Locker”) And also that the Best Director award last year, for a film that ostensibly “centered” women (“Everything Everywhere All At Once”) was conceived and directed by two young men who originally wanted Jackie Chan for the leading role and were more interested in finding a way to do a “multiverse” movie loaded with fight scenes than the mother/daughter themes that eventually made their way into the movie.

But then, even that movie was encrusted with existential profundity.

I’ve never seen so many reviews that felt the need to address the question: “What is the deep meaning of this film”? And all, more or less, gave the same answer. Here are three:

“Reality is just so much lately, and it’s partly in response to that feeling that we’ve seen an increase in a kind of performative nihilism — everything from edgelord meme culture to shitposting to billionaire bunkers and covid fatalism. We see that reflected in the film: Joy’s — er, Jobu Tupaki’s reason for trying to destroy the multiverse is that “nothing matters.”

And when you’re faced with that kind of argument, the only possible answer a hopeful human being can really provide, if we want to not be crushed beneath the weight of the alternate possibility, is: “No, everything matters.”

“What better way to show that than through a multiverse where everything, every act and choice, even tiny gestures of humanity or inhumanity, has a ripple effect — not just across lives but across dimensions? Everything, everywhere, all at once, matters.”

Another reviewer put it more concisely:

“Though never expressly stated, Everything Everywhere All At Once suggests that what makes life meaningful is the recognition that because there is no inherent meaning, all things and moments are equally meaningful.”

Aggh. The notion that “everything is meaningless so everything has meaning” is basically a justification for anything, and a pretty sophomoric one. I’m sure I heard some version of it many times when I was in high school and hanging out with the guys who read Camus and Kerouac. I found performative nihilism and the exuberance of meaninglessness sexy in those days. In 2024, though, “everything is equally meaningful (because equally meaningless)” doesn’t seem like a very apt answer to the depression and anxiety many of us feel after a decade that brought us ever-mutating COVID, an assault on the nation’s capital by guys in Viking costume, and a demonic idiot in White House. If it’s all “equally meaningful” does it matter who you vote for? Whether or not you get the damned vaccine? And wasn’t it Trump spokeswoman Kelly Anne Conway who came up with the idea of “alternative realities”?

What the Directors Branch doesn’t seem to feel is as profound as war or the really big boy toys like the bomb or multiversal existentialism are stories that center girl culture. That’s been Gerwig’s specialty (“Lady Bird,” “Little Women” most notably before “Barbie.”)

Gerwig has said, in several interviews, that a big influence on her thinking as she was imagining the script of “Barbie” was Mary Pipher’s Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Lives of Adolescent Girls. Published in 1994, Reviving Ophelia argues that:

“Something dramatic happens to girls in early adolescence. Just as planes and ships disappear mysteriously into the Bermuda Triangle, so do the selves of girls go down in droves. They crash and burn in a social and developmental Bermuda Triangle. ..They lose their resiliency and optimism and become less curious and inclined to take risks. They lose their assertive, energetic and ‘tomboyish’ personalities and become more deferential, self-critical and depressed. They report great unhappiness with their own bodies.” (P. 4)“Vibrant, confident girls become shy, doubting young women. Girls stop thinking ‘Who am I? What do I want?’ And start thinking ‘What must I do to please others?’ (P.7)

Leaving to one side the question of whether any of this has changed since 1994 (a question worthy of an article in itself) and staying with the idea of Pipher as an inspiration for “Barbie,” it’s not a stretch to see that Barbie undergoes, not just a universal “existential” crisis (“Do any of you sometimes think about death?”) but a crisis of “girlish” confidence when, having been chastised by a politically savvy group of young girls, she begins to question her own value and reason for being.

It’s a moment that had many women and girls weeping. We’ve been there. And “Barbie” shows that it happens no matter how pretty or slim or “nice” a girl is. At a certain point, she’s going to come crash up against the impossible expectations, the devaluations, the exclusions. The raised hands that never get called on in class. The male eyes that can’t seem to stay away from your breasts (which are always too small or too big, too flat or too floppy.) Being called “bossy” because you dare to assert yourself. And of course, much worse. The things that, whatever your definition, decisively qualify as misogynist.

“It’s just about our little life” is a line, taken from the correspondence of Louisa May Alcott, that Greta Gerwig gives to Jo March in her movie of the classic. Alcott’s actual publisher certainly thought so, finding Little Women “boring” until his niece, having found the unfinished manuscript, excitedly asked what happens to the little women. This real-life event is one that Gerwig tweaks and imports into the movie via an original subplot in which Jo tries to persuade a hidebound male editor named Mr. Dashwood into publishing her debut novel, which tells the story of the family.

“Mr. Dashwood” is still deciding what counts and what doesn’t. “Barbie” producer Amy Pascal recounts, “Mr. Dashwood just doesn’t get it, and in some ways he stands as a symbol of other men today who stubbornly think the story isn’t for them. He plays the gatekeeper.” And as Gerwig told The New York Times when Little Women came out, that scene between Jo and Mr. Dashwood “could have been written yesterday, sitting with an executive at a studio.” Our lives are still seen as “little,” our dolls just “chunks of plastic” to be dressed up in fantasy-outfits, our issues are just not as profound as those of young boys coming-of-age.

I’m sure that J.D. Salinger didn’t regard The Catcher in the Rye as just about the “little life” of a privileged Manhatten boy in existential crisis; the critics certainly didn’t think so. But when I was growing up, books about the challenges of growing up girl didn’t even exist, except as a specialized genre that boys wouldn’t dream of reading. Nancy Drew, Cherry Ames, Little Women.

Judging from the box-office takes of both Gerwig’s Little Women and the wonderful (and completely overlooked) Are You Listening, God? It’s Me, Margaret, that’s how prospective viewers have seen any films that are advertised, in one way or another (Little Women in its very title) as being “about girls” or “about women.” Both films were critically applauded. But boys, guys, and fathers weren’t going—and neither were many women, finding stories of girls growing up to be too “narrow.” As Elaine Cho says of Little Women: “Even though it takes place during the Civil War, we are hardly touched by outside events other than a few scenes with Marmee.” Didn’t hear that kind of complaint about Spielberg’s The Fabelmans, not to mention the dozens of fictional film about boyhood (Stand By Me, What’s Up, Gilbert Grape, and many, many others, including acknowledged classics like The 400 Blows).

I’m not one to insist on a work passing the “Bechdel Test.” I’m less interested in how many women are in a movie than the way that our lives are represented in the movies in which we appear. I’m an outlier who saw “Oppenheimer” as overblown and overbearing. (I will say more when I do my Oscars round-up.) Here, I’d just note how the film reduces the brilliant and fascinating women in Oppy’s life into plot-props or sex buddies. Don’t take my work for it. Read “American Prometheus.” There you’ll find that it’s unlikely Jean Tatlock killed herself over Oppenheimer. That the person she tried to reach before her death was not Oppenheimer but another women, whom she likely was having an affair with, That she had an MD in psychiatry: “By the time Oppenheimer left Berkeley in the spring of 1943, “ Kai Bird writes, “Jean was Dr. Jean Tatlock, a woman on the threshold of a rewarding medical career. She was a pediatric psychiatrist at Mount Zion Hospital, where most of her patients were mentally troubled children. She seemed to have found a career that suited her temperament and intellect.” (From American Prometheus)

Layer 3: Internationalism Trumps Feminism?

Last year, two guys stuffed their multiversal opus full of mother/daughter issues that women writers and directors had been tackling for generations, and it was hailed as ground-breaking and showered with awards.

I wonder if EEAAO would have been quite as celebrated, however, if the mother and daughter (and the actresses who played them)—as well as one of the director/writers—hadn’t been Asian-Americans? This year, a film I like very much—French filmmaker Justine Triet’s “Anatomy of a Fall”—rescued the Director Division from the charge of being totally male-centric. But “Anatomy of a Fall,” besides being as amenable to poststructuralist interpretations about “reality” and “truth” as EEAAO was to existential soul-searching about “the meaning of life,” is also French, and the Academy (as a member told “Entertainment Weekly,”is “buying internationalism” big-time over the past few years.

That’s a good thing.

But so is—for the first time, arguably—the breaking through of the invisible wall, like the “pink” aisle of “Toys R Us,” that reads “For Girls Only.” And amazingly, it was an unabashedly feminist movie—and a comedy!—that did it. I can’t tell you the number of men I know who walked into that movie ready to be bored to death or bashed over the head with feminist lectures, who came out smiling, some almost delirious with unexpected pleasure. I heard words like “transformative.”

“Barbie,” wrote one movie critic, “is one of the most inventive, immaculately crafted and surprising mainstream films in recent memory – a testament to what can be achieved within even the deepest bowels of capitalism…. It’s a pink-splattered manifesto to the power of irreplaceable creative labour and imagination.” Pretty amazing for a film that includes a monologue-sermon (delivered by America Ferrara, who has been nominated for best supporting actress) about the exhausting, contradictory demands placed on women:

You are so beautiful and so smart and it kills me that you don’t think you’re good enough.You are so beautiful and so smart and it kills me that you don’t think you’re good enough.

We have to always be extraordinary but somehow we’re always doing it wrong.

We have to be thin but not too thin, and we can never say we want to be thin you have to say you want to be healthy. But also you have to be thin.

You have to have money but you can’t ask for money. Because that’s crass.

You have to be a boss but you can’t be mean.

You have to lead but you can’t squash other people’s ideas.

You’re supposed to love being a mother but you don’t talk about your kids all the damn.

You have to be a career woman, but also look out for other people.

You have to answer for men’s bad behavior which is insane but if you point that out you’re accused of complaining.

Because you’re supposed to stay pretty for men but not so pretty you tempt them too much or you threaten other women. Because you’re supposed to be part of the sisterhood but always stand out.

And always be grateful but never forget that the system is rigged so find a way to acknowledge that but also always be grateful.

You have to never get old, never be rude, never show off, never be selfish, never fall down, never fail, never show fear, never get out of line. It’s too hard, its too contradictory, and nobody gives you a medal and says thank you.

And it turns out in fact that not only are you doing everything wrong but also everything is your fault.

I’m just so tired of watching myself and every single woman tie herself into knots so that people like us.

All of us who teach or have studied the history of feminist thought and activism will recognize that feminist work informs the entire script of “Barbie.” Who came up with the first critiques of beauty culture and the oppressiveness of “femininity”? Feminists.Who first examined masculinity as a “gender” rather than the neuter, unraced, unsexed universal subject? Feminists (female and male.) Who was responsible for the racial and body-type diversification of toys? Feminists (Black and “white”.) Who honored girl culture and girl play, showing how imaginative and subversive much of what little girls actually did with their Barbies was? Who has been capable of endless self-critique and reinvention? Feminism.

Barbie, though, is not “just” about “girl culture.” Few books and films about girls and women are—because girls and women live in a world with boys and men, and a system based on gender difference touches us all, even (perhaps especially) those who reject it. The genius of Barbie was to recognize this—it’s why so many men (especially younger men) are surprised to find out how much they enjoy it—and to make it a central part of the plot. It’s not so much a film about Barbie, but a film about gender and its discontents—some serious, some hilarious (Ken, dazzled by the real world: “Why didn’t Barbie tell me about Patriarchy??”), many both.

This is groundbreaking stuff. And it’s not “so American”—a justification given by some commentators as to why a film made by an American woman director didn’t make it but a film made by a French woman director did. That’s a pretty narrow view of who “Barbie” speaks to. Why is “Barbie” making so much money at the box office all over the world? Maybe it has something to do with the fact that despite her white bread beginnings, the doll has been welcomed by so many different nationalities and demographics, who used their imaginations to make her theirs. And maybe, too, it’s because “centering” the perspective of girls and women is less of a “specialty” market than Hollywood has imagined. After all, we do hold up half the sky. And the sky covers the entire world.

And why not both the sober, French “Anatomy of a Fall” and the good-natured, playful “Barbie”? Does the category only have room for one woman director at a time?

The 96th Academy Awards are broadcast on ABC on 10 March.

Watch for my Oscar Round-Up!

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