I've had Kenough: Begging You To Watch Another Movie
On Barbie and the Alleged Oscars Snub
Hi Barbies
Can everyone just take a moment and be serious?
No I mean, really guys, be serious
Like, can we all please get a grip.
For those blissfully unaware, major motion picture Barbie, was cruelly and unfairly snubbed by the Academy Awards, and didn’t get a single nomination. Oh wait, that’s not true, fine. Barbie was cruelly and unfairly snubbed by the Academy Awards for only getting eight nominations. It was only the fourth most nominated film of the year??? How is that fair!!!!
The past few weeks have been over-stuffed with discourse and takes about Barbie’s alleged Oscar snubs - tweet after tweet after tweet were decrying the lack of Oscar nominations for Margot Robbie as Lead Actress and Greta Gerwig as director (all whilst apparently ignoring the fact that Robbie was nominated as producer, and Gerwig got a nod for Best Adapted Screenplay). The Academy was deemed a deeply misogynistic institution that further proved the point of the Barbie movie - it’s not a Barbie world after all, the real world is full of Kens’, horses and patriarchy :( .
Don’t get me wrong, the real world is filled with patriarchy (and horses and guys called Ken), but why is Barbie the movie we’re pinning all our feminist aspirations on? For the first time since 2019, this is actually a solid batch of nominations with lots to celebrate - we have the first ever Indigenous Native American woman to be nominated (and hopefully) win Best Actress, four out of ten of the films nominated for Best Picture are woman-centric stories, and this years acting nominees feature a record breaking number of LGBTQ+ characters. Alas, a pink shadow has engulfed all these achievements, and all anyone can talk about is Barbie.
Girlhood
A brief detour into the apparent word of 2023: g i r l h o o d.
In 2023, we had girl math, girl dinner, a hot girl walk, the lucky girl, the clean girl, the Vanilla girl, the literary It girl, the rat girl, the tomato girl. Name a type of girl, there was a microtrend about it. Tiktok and instagram feeds were flooded with repackaging and repurposing what kind of girl you were.
Olivia Allen at Refinery29 wrote: “Not to be confused with “womanhood,” “girlhood” is the beaten-up ballet flats and pleated mini skirt to your mom’s mid-height mules and sensible knee-length silhouettes. It’s sticking grainy Sofia Coppola stills to your bedroom walls and screaming Maisie Peters lyrics on your walk home.”
Girlhood, despite being projected as a monolith, is personal. Despite that, endless tweets and tiktoks are sharing what they claim to be universal experiences; a rim of lipstick on diet coke, tying your hair up in ribbons, listening to Taylor Swift. If you don’t subscribe to these definitions of girlhood, you’re the worst kind of girl - a Pick Me girl. A woman hating, Taylor Swift hating, Christoper Nolan loving Judas to women who only likes things for male attention. Girls shouldn’t have to like masculine things to fit into society, they should wear pink and bows and lipgloss, and Barbie should be their favourite movie.
In essence, the rise of girlhood is comfortable. It’s choosing easy meals (some of which are low-key disordered eating, but that’s another conversation); it’s not having to worry about money (even though we are poor, and things are expensive.) It’s reverting back to a comfortable view of your childhood and adolescence - one where you didn’t have to worry about heartbreak or institutionalised sexism. Everything was beautiful, nothing hurt.
Girlhood is easy. The real world - womanhood - is difficult.
Back to the movies
Barbie is a feminist movie, but it’s an easy feminist movie. The film literally stops at the start of Act 3 to deliver a Tumblr-style feminist 101 monologue. I did roll my eyes during the now infamous monologue, but I was swiftly reminded that it’s a movie for kids, and lots of young women have spoken very highly of her monologue. But more than a feminist film, Barbie is a girlhood film. It’s about a young woman who enters the real world, realises it sucks, and tries to make her home the way it used to be before the horrors of real life sunk in - kind of how young women are reverting back to girlhood. At the end of Barbie, however, she realises that she wants more than the trappings of Barbieland, and she wants to experience the real world. She wants to experience womanhood. Though when tied up in all the pink and the merchandise, maybe the message got lost.
This year there are plenty of films - both nominated and not nominated - that are feminist films, or films about girlhood and womanhood. Poor Things is a surreal steampunk-esque story about a girl growing up and reclaiming her sexual identity and sense of self. Past Lives is a beautiful story about how you and your romantic life can evolve from girlhood to womanhood. Killers of The Flower Moon is centred around a stunning performance by Lily Gladstone, and shows how white men dehumanise and destroy Native American women, and Anatomy of a Fall is about a woman on trial - not necessarily for murder, but for being sexually and financially independent from her husband.’’
As for the films that were genuinely snubbed by the academy, we have Priscilla, a beautiful story with all the delicacy you’d expect from Sophia Coppola about Priscilla Presley's girlhood was taken away in exchange for a relationship. I haven’t seen Are You There God It’s Me, Margaret, because I’m certain it will make me cry, but I hear it’s a beautiful coming-of-age story about girlhood and motherhood.
Where was the feminist outrage for the above films, and countless more? Why aren’t we angry that Celine Song and Greta Lee weren’t nominated for Past Lives, or that Priscilla was completely shut out of awards conversations? Why aren’t we applauding that Anatomy of a Fall director Justine Triet was nominated for best director Best Original Screenplay, and that Sandra Huller got a nod for Best Actress?
Why are we only doing feminist outcries about movies covered in pink with tie-in merchandising?
All the above films are challenging. They’re not just about girlhood, they’re about womanhood. As the tiktok trends of 2023 have proven, girlhood is about making oneself comfortable, and countless films of 2023 aren’t easy or nicely wrapped up in a pink bow. They’re hard. As we (hopefully) say goodbye to the girlhood phase and step into womanhood, we should be embracing challenging or difficult art. Womanhood should be embraced in all it’s ugly multicoloured glory. Not just when it’s pink.