Margot Robbie’s ‘Barbie’ Oscar Snub Isn’t Anti-Woman — It’s Because The Academy Remains Anti-Comedy

Margot Robbie received her third Oscar nomination this week, but not in the category you might assume. While Robbie has been previously nominated in the categories of Best Actress (for I, Tonya) and Best Supporting Actress (for Bombshell, puzzlingly, rather than the same year’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood…), this year, Robbie’s ticket to the ceremony comes courtesy of her producing career. She’s named in the Best Picture nomination for Barbie, the year’s highest-grossing film, and recipient of seven additional Oscar nods. While the role of movie producers can often be opaque to outsiders, Robbie clearly shepherded Barbie from toy shelves to movie screens, securing director Greta Gerwig and the kind of creative freedom that might well improve any number of glorified toy commercials. Robbie was helping Barbie transcend its avaricious origins even before she stepped in front of the camera to play the title role.

That performance, however, was not similarly honored with an Oscar nomination. Given that Greta Gerwig didn’t make it into the Best Director field, while Ryan Gosling did make the cut for Best Supporting Actor, it’s tempting (and not totally invalid) to diagnose a familiar case of Hollywood sexism. But of course, Robbie’s Best Actress bid wasn’t displaced by a dude; five women got in over her. Is it possible that Robbie was still undervalued because her movie and performance were seen as stereotypically “girly”? (Her character is literally referred to as Stereotypical Barbie multiple times in the movie itself.) Yes – but that kind of tacit dismissal is related to another that crosses gender lines while indulging in a similarly misguided bias: The Academy Awards, as an institution, aren’t that fond of comedy.

That’s an oversimplification. As Gosling’s nomination shows, Oscar voters are plenty fond of comedy that knows its place. Gosling’s Ken does have an affecting story arc in the film – enough, really, in both importance and screentime that he might well have competed with the other fellows in the Best Actor category. But of course, the studio knew better than that; Gosling would never be nominated for Best Actor, because comic performances are largely consigned to the supporting categories, where they can be described as scene-stealing, even if the scenes in question are already actually about them. By getting in for a broadly comic role, Gosling joins an eclectic batch of luminaries including Jonah Hill (The Wolf of Wall Street), Melissa McCarthy (Bridesmaids), Robert Downey Jr. (Tropic Thunder), Maria Bakalova (Borat Subsequent Moviefilm), and Dianne Wiest (Bullets Over Broadway).

If you’re anything like me, looking at that list of nominees is uncommonly satisfying, especially for the serially disappointing Academy. The occasional wins in this vein are even better; I literally cannot think of more deserving awards recipients than Kevin Kline for A Fish Called Wanda or Marisa Tomei for My Cousin Vinny. Every time I think about Kline in Fish Called Wanda, ordering people not to call him stupid, or working himself in a frothing rage just by rehearsing an attempted apology, or insisting “you’re the vulgarian, you fuck!” (reportedly an ad-lib!), I grin. Virtually any moment of Marisa Tomei in Vinny (“Imagine you’re a deer…”) could function as her Oscar clip. (The actual clip chosen is her explaining tire tracks and Positraction; how could anyone wonder if her win was a secret error after that?)

Does Robbie have moments in Barbie that iconic? Perhaps not – those are, admittedly, the kind of marks that are probably easier to hit when you’re not the center-stage title-character star of a movie, which helps explain why comedy is a reliable supporting strategy but not necessarily a winning tactic for leads. Maybe the “supporting” nature of Tomei or Kline (despite Tomei being second lead and Kline being strong third) makes it easier for their more demonstrative work to read as all killer, no filler.

Yet I don’t see much filler in Robbie’s Barbie performance; it’s neither nonstop schtick nor subservient to leading-lady blandness. She sustains a remarkable balancing act throughout the picture, playing an idea becoming a person, and it’s all the more so for scoring laughs pretty much the whole way through. The film draws on a side of Robbie previously seen in movies like Birds of Prey or Babylon: the outsized star of her own world, here recast as a naïf rather than a tough-talking spitfire. Even when she’s devastated by being called a fascist, her despair has a sweetly literal humor: “I don’t control the railways or the flow of commerce!” she cries. It’s a funny line from a funny screenplay, to be sure, but one I suspect isn’t as easy to nail as it looks – especially considering the genuine pathos that remains beneath the surface.

And what’s what comedy is often about, isn’t it? Making something technically quite difficult appear light, easy, and breezy. So of course Jennifer Lawrence wasn’t a serious contender for No Hard Feelings; her slapstick contortions are almost a parody of serious-actress strenuousness. The year’s actual nominees tend toward suffering, whether physical, mental, or both. The exception that proves the rule is Emma Stone: She’s hilarious in Poor Things, in a role that’s quite similar to Robbie’s in Barbie, with the crucial trick of not advertising itself as a full-fledged comedy, using period elements, genre elements, and a less comic final stretch to create plausible deniability. It’s a very good film, in which Stone is terrific. (All of the nominees are terrific; I assume that may even apply to Annette Bening in Nyad, but unfortunately not a single person outside the Academy has been able to watch this movie on Netflix to verify.) It also confers a kind of tragicomic weight upon Stone’s physicality, seemingly not afforded to Robbie’s equally physical embodiment of a doll-woman. For all of the delights and minor shocks of Poor Things – again, a worthy movie; I saw it twice – it lacks a certain stealthiness, a sense of surprise and discovery that really shouldn’t come more easily to the toy-based version of this girlhood-to-womanhood journey, but does (making it all the more surprising even beyond its curveball gags and unexpected references).

Now, as many have pointed out, we need not weep for Margot Robbie, forced to console herself with merely producing the biggest movie of the year; receiving an Oscar nomination in one category but not another; ascending to a higher plane of movie-star recognition; and generally being extraordinarily talented, rich, and beautiful. As with most Oscar matters, the real takeaway is that voters liked these five performances more, not necessarily that they liked the “snubbed” party so much less. It does explain, however, why there’s been such an outcry over Robbie’s exclusion in the Best Actress category; this doesn’t just reflect the oft-remarked (and oft-overstated!) gap between “Oscar tastes” and popularity with “regular” moviegoers, though there is some of that, alongside some regrettable girlbossing. More broadly, though, the love for Robbie’s performance speaks to the way that comedies are equally capable of goofing and zinging their way into our hearts, and how actors can guide that process along. It’s a lesson the Academy seems to prefer in smaller doses.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.