Why weren't Barbie's director and lead actress Kenough for Oscar nominations?
CBC
"Did this film direct itself?"
When a female-directed film that received critical acclaim and box-office success was nominated in several Oscar categories — including best picture, but not best director — that was the question that had people buzzing.
But this wasn't Barbie, and the director wasn't Greta Gerwig. This was 1992, when Barbra Streisand's directorial snub for The Prince of Tides was seen as so controversial that Billy Crystal called it out in his opening song at the 64th annual Academy Awards, crooning, "Seven nominations on the shelf/Did this film direct itself?"
More than 30 years later, many are asking the same question after Gerwig's Barbie, the undisputed box-office leader for 2023, received eight nominations Tuesday but was passed over for best director, as well as best lead actress for Barbie herself (Margot Robbie). Rubbing salt in the wound for fans of the film that skewered the patriarchy was the fact that Ryan Gosling was nominated for best supporting actor for playing Ken.
Memes and reactions quickly made their way around the internet, many of them calling out the snub for being a little too on-the-nose. Former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton even chimed in Wednesday.
"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," Clinton wrote on X, formally known as Twitter.
Gosling released a statement expressing his disappointment that Gerwig and Robbie weren't nominated in their respective categories, noting "there is no Ken without Barbie, and there is no Barbie movie without Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie, the two people most responsible for this history-making, globally celebrated film."
As the reactions, and the reactions to the reactions, keep flooding online, some are wondering: if Barbie couldn't shatter the patriarchy, what can?
"A woman could do everything right but the patriarchy will find something wrong," wrote one person in a TikTok video reacting to the snub that racked up more than 2.4 million views.
"They've lost the entire plot," wrote another person in a video with 1.1 million likes.
Since the Oscars' inception in 1929, only three women have ever taken home the award for best director: Kathryn Bigelow for The Hurt Locker in 2009, Chloé Zhao for Nomadland in 2020, and Jane Campion for The Power of the Dog in 2021.
And while this year's nominations include a female director — Justine Triet for Anatomy of a Fall — she's one of only eight to ever be nominated. Among that short list of female nominees is Gerwig — again, not for Barbie, but for Lady Bird in 2018.
The difference with Barbie, says Lisa Coulthard, a professor of cinema and media studies in the department of theatre and film at the University of British Columbia, could be the same problem Barbie herself encounters in the film: it's not considered "serious" enough.
"Commercial success doesn't necessarily translate into Oscar nominations and Barbie is the kind of movie often snubbed as not 'serious' enough for the Oscars," Coulthard told CBC News.
