Greta Gerwig's Barbie got eight Oscar nominations. Why are people saying it got 'snubbed'?

The perceived ‘snub’ of Margot Robbie and Greta Gerwig (centre, right) is leaving little room for the success stories out of this year’s Oscar nominations like Lily Gladstone of Killers of the Flower Moon (left).  (Supplied: Apple TV+/Warner Bros/AP: Chris Pizzello)

The internet is fuming that Margot Robbie and Greta Gerwig were passed over for best actress and best director nominations for the 2024 Academy Awards.

Their box office hit Barbie may have nabbed eight nods, including best picture, but fans feel Robbie and Gerwig should have been recognised for “pushing the culture”, and point to them being snubbed as ironic proof a movie like Barbie is still needed in 2024.

(This being a world in which a man is nominated for his role as a beach-loving crotchless doll, over Robbie and Gerwig, the women who made the movie happen.)

So how did we get here?

First, here’s how Oscar voting works

OK, so before you start grabbing your pitchforks, the Oscars actually have a pretty robust voting system.

It’s only gotten stronger since their massive overhaul in 2016, when the #OscarsSoWhite campaign led hundreds of members to be added to the voting pool in an effort to increase diversity.

There are more than 10,000 members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and all of them have something to do with the film industry.

From there, members are separated into 17 factions to vote for the nominations, so directors vote for best director, sound people vote for the sound awards, etc.

This is the rule for all categories except best picture — everyone gets to nominate for the big one.

After two rounds of voting, we get the official nominations, which we received today. Then the Academy members will vote one last time to decide the winners, which are revealed at the March ceremony.

So that’s that. But of course we at ABC Entertainment have takes. Here, reporters Velvet Winter, Jared Richards and Yasmin Jeffery unpack theirs.

‘I loved Barbie, but popularity doesn’t give you carte blanche to dictate awards season’

I must admit, I was almost swept up in the swathes of girls crying over Gerwig and Robbie’s names missing from their respective categories, writes Velvet Winter.

In some ways it does suck; Gerwig and Robbie were instrumental in bringing the unthinkable to the big screen and they deserve their flowers. But they got them, in the form of a $US1.45 billion ($2.2 billion) box office pull, which would have put a hefty sum in both their pockets.

With a cultural phenomenon like Barbie, it’s easy to conflate “popular” and “best”.

We’ve seen this story before in 2019 when Black Panther, the undeniable box office hit of 2018, got Oscar nods for best picture and a number of technical awards but no nominations for acting or director Ryan Coogler.

There was an outcry then over the snub, but the difference between then and now is that Michael B. Jordan didn’t come out trashing the Academy voters ’cause Chadwick Boseman didn’t get a best actor nomination.

Because, really, the icing on the cake were the statements released today by the two Barbie actors nominated for top-line awards.

Ryan Gosling’s was typically Kennish, full of white knight statements blasting Academy voters for not recognising Gerwig and Robbie specifically.

But it was America Ferrera having to come out to defend Gerwig and Robbie’s oversight that really broke my heart.

Ferrera, who has been consistently nailing these kinds of roles for two decades, had to share her spotlight with two people who have very much been praised this awards season.

And the Gerwig/Robbie upset is really sucking the air out of other, more joyous news from today’s Oscar noms.

Like the response from the Godzilla Minus One team when they found out they had been nominated for best visual effects.

Ahhh, that’s better.

‘Why are people crying when Barbie got nominations for everything that was good about it?’

Ferrera and Gosling delivered impeccable performances as supporting actors — Ferrera in particular, given her character Gloria’s arc was a stale exercise in second-wave feminism, writes Yasmin Jeffery.

Gosling, on the other hand, brought desperately needed humour with a triple-threat performance. (Yes, the irony is ironying that Ken was one of the best things about the Barbie film, but we’ve had a while to come to terms with this fact.) Their supporting actor award nods make total sense.

Of course the best songs from Barbie’s star-studded, genius soundtrack were nominated too. (With one notable exception — I demand justice for Ken’s version of Matchbox Twenty’s Push. Let’s talk about THAT Oscars snub please.)

The Barbie movie took production and costume design to new, globally disruptive heights (remember the pink paint shortage?), and it also deserves recognition for that.

The Academy even threw Barbie two more big bones, nominating it for best picture and best adapted screenplay. This is huge considering the film was a thinly sketched disappointment heaped with feminist messaging that might have been revolutionary in, say, 2008.

I understand the argument that Barbie wasn’t made for fourth-wave feminists, and was more likely an exercise in meeting the many people out there who refuse to believe the patriarchy even exists. And that’s all well and good. But it isn’t groundbreaking.

And that’s why Barbie should be happy with the eight nominations it did get.

‘Representation goes beyond Barbie’

Lots of the Barbie snub chatter online has equated it to a loss for feminism: Meanwhile, this year’s Academy Awards have several representational milestones for women and minority groups, writes Jared Richards.

For the first time in the awards’ 96 years, this year’s best picture list includes three films directed by women: Past Lives, Anatomy of a Fall and Barbie.

Of those three, only Anatomy director Justine Triet is also nominated for best director, and is only the ninth woman director to ever be nominated.

Two women directors have only been nominated in the same year once before (Emerald Fennell and Chloé Zhao in 2021), and it would have been nice to see that here. But it’s been a particularly tight race since best picture ballooned to 10 picks, while best director stayed at five.

In original screenplay, we also have three women nominated: Justine Triet, Samy Burch for May December (if we’re talking snubs, this film right here!) and Past Lives’s Celine Song. Song is also the first Asian woman to be nominated in that category.

There are plenty of other milestones to celebrate, too. Lily Gladstone’s nomination for best actress for Killers of the Flower Moon makes her the category’s first-ever Native American nominee, and its fifth Indigenous nominee. Gladstone is also the first publicly out gender diverse person to ever be nominated across any acting category: She has previously spoken about “decolonising” her gender, and uses the pronouns she/they. (Elliot Page was nominated for Juno, but was not out as a trans man.)

Jeffrey Wright and Colman Domingo’s best actor nominations mark just the second time two Black actors have gone head-to-head there. Domingo and Jodie Foster’s nominations are also a win for LGBTIQA+ representation, marking the first time two openly queer actors have been nominated for playing queer roles.

It’s also the first year more than one non-English language film has been nominated for best picture (Past Lives, The Zone of Interest, Anatomy of a Fall), with the Academy recognising that there’s a whole world beyond Hollywood. And Barbieland, too.