THE WORD ‘SNUB’ doesn’t get much of a runout any other month of the year, but late January is its time to shine.

It is Hollywood’s awards season, and yesterday saw the announcement of the nominations for the 96th Academy Awards, set to take place on 10 March. As is often the case, there has been as much focus on who hasn’t been nominated as there is on the nominees. This year, however, there seems to be an additional layer of irony. 

Barbie, the highest grossing film of 2023 and bona fide pop culture phenomenon, is up for Best Film, with two of its actors – Ryan Gosling and America Ferrara – nominated in the respective best supporting categories. Despite this seeming endorsement of the film’s Oscar-worthiness, its director Greta Gerwig is not to be found among Martin Scorsese and Christopher Nolan in the Best Director category, and its lead Margot Robbie was similarly “snubbed”. 

The omission of the two women most integral to a film which is explicitly and unsubtly about the additional burdens faced by women in every arena of life, while their male counterpart is nominated, seems on the nose in a way that could almost be an epilogue to Barbie itself.

Without spoiling the plot of the film, it hinges on the unmissable and unmistakeable message that women have to work harder to navigate the sexist and contradictory demands of society in order to achieve fulfilment. 

“I’m just so tired of watching myself and every single other woman tie herself into knots so that people will like us,” says America Ferrera’s character Gloria at one point in a monologue that has been venerated, discussed and derided at length since the movie debuted as one-half of last summer’s Barbenheimer phenomenon.

In the aftermath of the nominations announcement, quotes from the Barbie monologue have immediately been seized upon by fans seeking to illustrate the self-fulfilling nature of the film’s plot. The women who made the film (Robbie was also a producer on Barbie) forgotten while the male lead receives the most prestigious recognition on offer.

Oppenheimer, on the other hand, leads the Oscar nominations with 13, with three acting noms and Nolan up for the Best Director gong. 

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It is not just fans of Barbie who have expressed their disappointment. Gosling immediately made a striking and emphatic public statement calling on Gerwig and Robbie’s work to be “recognised along with the other very deserving nominees”. 

“… 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 the actor.

He added: “To say that I’m disappointed that they are not nominated in their respective categories would be an understatement.”

Barbie’s success and popularity is well beyond debate. It was the top-grossing film of 2023, and its eight Academy Award nominations are a testament to the film’s quality. Does that make it unjust that Gerwig and Robbie have not been nominated? Well, not necessarily.

First of all: who do you cut? Lily Gladstone? The Killers of the Flower Moon star became the first ever Native American woman to be nominated for Best Actress for her stunning performance. Elsewhere, Sandra Hüller gave a masterful bilingual performance in Anatomy of a Fall.

That Margot Robbie deserves to be nominated ahead of these performers – or Oscar mainstays Annette Benning, Carey Mulligan and Emma Stone – is purely, squarely, incontrovertibly a matter of opinion.

Gerwig’s case for inclusion is stronger. It is a semi-regular source of confusion during Oscars season when a film is nominated for a raft of awards while somehow the director, the person who orchestrates every other award-worthy element of the film, gets overlooked. 

Even so, what is an Oscar nomination worth?

The credibility of the Oscars has suffered in recent years. Last year, Avatar: The Way of the Water was nominated for Best Picture — a nomination that feels like it paved the way for The Golden Globes’ inaugural Cinematic and Box Office Achievement Award this year. 

The Academy has toyed with such an idea in the past, announcing plans for a category titled ‘Outstanding Achievement in Popular Film’ category in 2018, only to scrap the proposal a month later due to backlash from fans and critics alike. On the one hand, the move was condemned for pandering to fans of popular films, while fans of popular films slammed the move as a way of ensuring that films such as Black Panther could not be nominated in the original Best Picture category.

In 2015 and 2016, the #OscarsSoWhite campaign sought to highlight that in both years, all actors nominated in all four acting categories were Caucasian. In 2017, there was further furore when presenter Warren Beatty ended the night by mistakenly announcing that La La Land had won Best Picture instead of the actual winning film Moonlight. The blunder was only corrected after the entire production team of La La Land had taken the stage. 

This begs the question of whether an Oscar nomination is even the seal of quality and prestige that it was thought of for so long. Haven’t we all seen Oscar-winning films we don’t like? Don’t heartbreaking, uplifting, life-changing performances get ignored every single year? Didn’t Bohemian Rhapsody win the Oscar for Best Editing in 2019?

Ultimately, the problem is the Oscars themselves. Not necessarily the people who decide who gets nominated, but the very idea that we can somehow divine what is definitively the best movie, who is definitively the best actress.

Gosling called for Gerwig and Robbie to be recognised alongside the other nominees, but the very purpose of awards is to construct a hierarchy within art – to categorise actors, directors, composers, cinematographers and all the constituent agents of film into longlists, shortlists, nominees and winners. Gerwig and Robbie have six Academy Award nominations between them.

Accepting the very premise of awards means that we have already decided not to recognise all worthy artists “alongside” each other, but to stratify them instead.

If recognising art is the point, any ceremony built around winners and losers will always see someone get snubbed.