The Barbie Snub Outrage Proves That When It Comes To Diversity, We’re Only Thinking Of White Women

Every year when the Academy Award nominations are announced, there is dialogue about who got snubbed. In 1983, Barbra Streisand was snubbed with her directorial debut, Yentyl, where, despite the film being nominated for five Oscars and winning two, she wasn't nominated for best director. In 2015, the Academy didn't nominate Ava DeVurnay for best director for the important Selma. See also: Spike Lee. Glenn Close. Sigourney Weaver. Viola Davis. Angela Bassett. Stephanie Hsu.

Oscar snubs aren't new by any means.

Conversations have been swirling after the Oscar nominations for 2024 were announced, dominated by one surprising omission that has the world — especially women — talking. 2023's biggest box office hit, Barbie, earned eight nominations across the board. But people have found two omissions particularly controversial — Margot Robbie being overlooked for best actress and Greta Gerwig shut out of best director. Instead, the best director category features Jonathan Glazer (The Zone of Interest), Yorgos Lanthimos (Poor Things), Christopher Nolan (Oppenheimer), Martin Scorsese (Killers of the Flower Moon), and Justine Triet (Anatomy of a Fall) — the only woman to grace the list.

Already, people's outrage at Robbie and Gerwig's snubs have been, well, loud. They've nominated Ken (Ryan Gosling) but not Barbie. A film that speaks about how women are often sidelined in patriarchal structures doesn't get the director, who is a woman, nominated in her category? Have they watched Barbie? Did they just miss the point?

Ryan Gosling may be Just Ken, but he was just as keen to join in on the outrage, releasing a statement detailing his surprise.

"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," said Gosling.

But I can't help but wonder — where are the celebrations for the nomination of America Ferrera, who recited one of the most compelling pieces of dialogue in the film?

A quick scroll of my Instagram feed tells a similar story — it's all anger about Barbie, but generally omitting that one of its cast members is nominated; someone who actually made history as the first-ever Oscar nominee of Honduran descent in any category. While there is obvious subjectivity in who gets nominated for an award and who doesn't, what matters is how we react to it — and at the moment, we've completely ignored all the people of colour who have set records this year, in favour of rage on behalf of two (white) women.

While I don't want to negate anyone's frustrations about female representation in the Best Director category (which is entirely warranted as it has notoriously been awful), there is something that feels distinctly off about the discourse happening online at the moment. Let me explain.

What our rage about Barbie fails to take into account is that this year, we're seeing one of the most diverse sets of nominations by the Academy since its inception. Seven out of the 20 acting Oscar nominees across Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress, Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor were people of colour, many of whom were nominated for the first time.

Lily Gladstone has made history as the first-ever Native American nominated for Best Actress for her work in Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon (and she might just win it). We've been gifted with one of the most diverse Best Supporting Actress categories, with Danielle Brooks (The Colour Purple), Ferrera (Barbie) and Da'Vine Joy Randolph (The Holdovers) all being nominated — a game-changing win on the diversity front. In Best Picture, a record amount of women filmmakers saw their movies get nominated, including Justine Triet's Anatomy of a Fall, Greta Gerwig's Barbie, and Celine Song's Past Lives.

Meanwhile, Colman Domingo (Rustin) is the first Afro Latino to be nominated in the Best Actor category, which he's nominated alongside the phenomenal Jeffrey Wright for his performance in the race satire, American Fiction. Fellow castmate and African American actor, Sterling K. Brown, also got a nod for the Best Supporting Actor — the first time a Black lead actor has been nominated against a supporting actor from the same movie.

In addition, it has been a big year for queer representation, with Colman Domingo and Best Supporting Actress nominee Jodie Foster (Nyad), who are both queer, both scoring nominations for playing queer characters on screen — another first in Oscar nom history.

It sounds like there's quite a lot to celebrate — so why aren't we celebrating?

It's undoubtedly a phenomenal year for diversity, so why are we focusing our concern on the fact that two cis white women, who carry an enormous amount of privilege as is, aren't nominated for an award? "Barbie was a movie about women, so the Oscars nominated Ken" is the popular rhetoric spiralling around at the moment — and I get it; it tells a great narrative about the inequality of industry awards which has plagued the industry since its inception.

It's very convenient to say that this snub proves the entire point of Barbie. But if you ask me, it's entirely misdirected. I know I will make a lot of people angry with these statements, and I hope I make them uncomfortable, too. We have a serious issue if we're more passionate about a white woman not being nominated than celebrating the women of colour in the film who actually were nominated — and against the odds, at that. Has the Academy missed the entire point of Barbie? Or has everyone else — who seems far more concerned with pedalling the rhetoric of white feminism than celebrating the achievements of people of colour? When a white woman isn't nominated, people lose it. But when people of colour defy the odds, they're ambivalent.

I don't want anyone to think that I'm playing into the age-old conversations that women's movies aren't serious business. They are — and we need more of them. But where is the anger about Celine Song and Greta Lee? Where is the celebration for the first Native American woman to be nominated? Why is hardly anyone even mentioning Ferrera's achievement in the same breath as Robbie and Gerwig's snub? Where is the praise for the people of colour who managed to be nominated for their films, which they've achieved despite the odds?

While many of us are concerned about gender equality in awards seasons, I think we need more of a focus on intersectionality. We can be angry about women not being nominated, but if that anger only extends to white women, we need to question what structures we're actually trying to dismantle.

It should go without saying that the Academy has work to do when it comes to representation. It should go without saying that more women need to be platformed in Best Director categories. It should go without saying that there's an issue in the fact that when people of colour are nominated, they're usually as supporting actors to their white counterparts. It should go without saying that we shouldn't have to celebrate small wins; that they should be ingrained in the Hollywood system as a whole. Yet, when we're enraged about Gerwig and Robbie's snubs and negating other achievements, we're saying quite a lot.

Let me be clear — I'm angry too. I'm angry that women are still fighting for breadcrumbs in an industry that has historically excluded us. I'm angry that the industry is still having firsts, that shouldn't really be firsts at all. But honestly, I'm angry that we've used our anger to show that diversity matters — but only if you're white.