White Women of Film Twitter, You Need To Calm Down

By Brian Richards | Social Media | January 25, 2024 |

By Brian Richards | Social Media | January 25, 2024 |

The nominations for the 96th Academy Awards were announced earlier this week, and besides the fact that there were very few surprises when it came to which films and actors were nominated, the biggest topic of conversation was about who didn’t get nominated. Margot Robbie wasn’t nominated for Best Actress for her performance in Barbie, and Greta Gerwig didn’t get a Best Director nomination for Barbie. Of course, the Internet (and by “the Internet,” I mostly mean “Twitter”) had a lot to say about the fact that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences felt the need to snub the lead actress and the director of the billion-dollar worldwide phenomenon that was Barbie.

Here are a few examples of what was said in Robbie and Gerwig’s defense: If a man had directed Barbie, the Academy would’ve nominated him for Best Director without hesitation. The Academy’s refusal to nominate them both, but to nominate Ryan Gosling and his performance as Ken for Best Supporting Actor, is a real-life example of what happened in Barbie, as it’s another example of how toxic and destructive the male patriarchy is towards women, their feelings, and their accomplishments. It’s utterly ridiculous that Barbie is deserving of Oscar nods, but not the lead actress who plays the title character, or the woman who directed it and helped bring it to life and make it a reality.

As someone who saw and enjoyed Barbie on Barbenheimer weekend, I would’ve loved to see Robbie and Gerwig get their Oscar nominations for Best Actress and Director, and it was easy to understand why there was so much anger and frustration about the two of them being excluded from those categories. However, there was also a lot that was said about how this particular backlash, and all of the noise it was making, was some absolute bullsh-t, and it was very hard to disagree with what was being said.

First off, Margot Robbie and Greta Gerwig may not have been nominated for Best Actress and Director, but they were still nominated. Robbie was a producer for Barbie, which means that if the film wins its nomination for Best Picture, she gets to go up on stage to accept an Oscar, along with her fellow producers. Gerwig co-wrote Barbie with her partner, writer-director Noah Baumbach, and both of them were nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay. So for people to act as if they got no attention whatsoever from the Academy made little to no sense. Then there’s the fact that America Ferrera, who plays Gloria in Barbie, and who gave the now-classic “It is literally impossible to be a woman” monologue that had some viewers singing its praises, and others loathing it for being Feminism 101 simplistic, and for making the film too “woke,” was nominated for Best Supporting Actress. Of course, if you had no idea that Ferrera was even nominated for her performance in Barbie, that might be because more people made more noise and focused more attention on picking up their swords, their bows, and their axes in defense of Robbie and Gerwig, instead of cheering for and congratulating not just a talented character actress who has been doing the damn thing for two decades, but a talented character actress who is also Latina (Ferrera is of Honduran descent, with Lenca ancestry). Because it’s not as if Latinas get much attention from the Oscars in any category, or any attention at all.

Lily Gladstone became the first Native American woman to be nominated by the Oscars, thanks to her performance in Killers of the Flower Moon, and she is considered to be the frontrunner to win the Oscar for Best Actress. (FYI: Gladstone isn’t the first Indigenous actress to receive an Oscar nomination for Best Actress, as that honor belongs to South Asian/Maori actress Merle Oberon for The Dark Angel, followed many years later by Maori/Anglo-Australian actress Keisha Castle-Hughes for Whale Rider, and Mexican actress Yalitza Aparicio for Roma.) But that accomplishment hasn’t come close to gaining the same amount of online chatter and media attention as Robbie and Gerwig being snubbed, and there are still some people who think that Gladstone’s performance should’ve been submitted for the Best Supporting Actress category instead of Best Actress, even though it’s clear that she was the female lead of Killers of the Flower Moon. (It hasn’t escaped notice that some of the people saying this about Gladstone and her Best Actress nomination believe that Emma Stone’s performance in Poor Things is more deserving of an Oscar win, and that Gladstone is preventing that from happening.)

As for the complaints that Ryan Gosling’s performance as Ken is largely responsible for his female collaborators being snubbed because of all of the focus and screen time that went towards his character? Gosling wasn’t competing against Robbie for Best Actress, nor was he up against Gerwig for Best Director. He is not standing in either woman’s way when it comes to their Oscar chances, and Gosling himself expressed both his disappointment and his support on behalf of them both, while also congratulating Ferrera for her nomination, along with his other Barbie colleagues for their respective nominations.

The intensity of this discourse became so overwhelming that many Black women and women of color on social media started getting angry. Even those who have no beef at all with either Robbie or Gerwig couldn’t help but notice that this was yet another example of White Feminism rearing its head once again. (The fact that Mary McNamara of the Los Angeles Times had the audacity to write this about Gladstone’s performance in defense of Barbie, and of Robbie and Gerwig, was just one glaring example.) All of the noise that white women were making on behalf of Margot Robbie and Greta Gerwig, and how their hard and amazing work was ignored by the Academy, and yet, if you asked those same white women if they made that same amount of noise on behalf of Black and brown female directors, and directors who are women of color, how likely is it that any of them would answer in the affirmative? If these white feminists were offered one dollar and asked to name a female director who isn’t white or a film made by a female director who isn’t white, would they be able to do that? Would any of them be familiar with the work of Dee Rees, Julie Dash, Lulu Wang, Kasi Lemmons, Cathy Yan, Celine Song, Salli Richardson-Whitfield, Regina King, Raven Jackson, Adele Lim, Melina Matsoukas, Leslie Harris, Cheryl Dunye, Darnell Martin, Angela Robinson, Janicza Bravo, Gina Prince-Bythewood, Debbie Allen, Nikyata Jusu, or Ava DuVernay?

Hell, would any of them know the name Justine Triet, or that she is a white female director who actually did get nominated for Best Director this year for the film Anatomy of a Fall?

2023 Films Directed by Women that received 0 Oscar noms: a 🧵

— Jillian @ Sundance (@JillianChili) January 24, 2024

If any of these white women were asked if they spoke up in defense of The Marvels director Nia DaCosta when she was constantly and undeservedly libeled and thrown under the bus for having the audacity to…(checks notes)…start pre-production on another film before The Marvels opened in theaters, and to admit that the film belonged more to Kevin Feige than it did to her? Would they be able to say ‘yes?’

If any of these white women were asked if they spoke up on behalf of Trace Lysette, and her performance in Monica so that the Motion Picture Academy would acknowledge her work with an Oscar nomination for Best Actress, or Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, and her performance in Origin, or Teyana Taylor and her performance in A Thousand and One, the way they spoke up on behalf of Andrea Riseborough and her performance in To Leslie so that the Academy would pay attention to her? Would any of them be able to say ‘yes?’

It’s safe to say that their answers to those questions would sound something like this.

No one is saying that you shouldn’t be upset or disappointed about Margot Robbie and Greta Gerwig not getting Best Actress and Best Director nominations for Barbie. (If anything, we should all be more upset and disappointed that Robbie didn’t win an Oscar for her performance in I, Tonya. Now that was some bullsh-t!) But both women are going to be just fine, and they’ll both have many more opportunities to show the Motion Picture Academy what they can do, and possibly earn more Oscar nominations as a result. And there is so much more about this year’s Oscar nominations that deserves everyone’s focus and attention than just what those two didn’t get. Besides the nominations for Gladstone and Ferrera, we also got to see nominations for Danielle Brooks, Da’vine Joy Randolph, Jeffrey Wright, Sterling K. Brown, American Fiction writer-director Cord Jefferson, and Colman Domingo, who became the first Afro-Latino actor to receive an Oscar nomination for Best Actor. (The National Hispanic Foundation for the Arts did a very piss-poor job in how they chose to acknowledge Domingo’s achievement, which was seen as yet another example of Afro-Latino erasure, and Twitter has been dragging the f-ck out of them as a result.) So the next time you decide to make noise about how women and their accomplishments are ignored and disrespected by Hollywood and by the Motion Picture Academy? Make sure you’re doing it for all of the women, and not just the ones who have the complexion for the protection.