It’s the Oscar snub so egregious even the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation felt compelled to weigh in: “Hypothetically, if I was going to nominate a film about a badger, starring a badger, called “Badger,” for best picture… I would also nominate the badger, right?”
This year there’s no film they could be talking about besides Barbie, which is not the only best picture nominee with a titular role— Oppenheimer and Maestro are both named for their chain-smoking main characters — but the only one that didn’t get a corresponding acting nomination for its star, Margot Robbie. The oddity of how Barbie’s 8 Oscar nominations were distributed was easily the most discussed topic of Tuesday’s announcement, ranging from excitement at America Ferrera’s surprise best supporting actress nomination to a theory that linked Ryan Gosling’s nomination to the 2016 election.
It’s true that Barbie supporters had every reason to expect that Robbie, who received SAG, BAFTA, Golden Globes, and Critics Choice nominations, would find a way into the best actress lineup. But it’s also true that the Oscars have had an annoying tendency to overlook the performer right at the center of some of their favorite movies, especially in the last decade or so. It might not be a lot of comfort today, but Stereotypical Barbie is in some very good company.
2022: Tom Cruise and Top Gun: Maverick
The closest comparison to the Robbie snub may have happened just last year, when Top Gun: Maverick earned six Oscar nominations without a corresponding actor nod for Tom Cruise. (Cruise even got a best picture nomination as one of the film’s producers, just as Robbie has) Maverick was less dependent on performances than Barbie, and Cruise didn’t have to sit back while his co-stars got nominated instead. But Maverick, like Barbie, was the biggest box office hit of the year, and was kept at a bit of arm’s length by the Academy, missing out on a best director nomination (yes, just like Greta Gerwig) and settling for a single statue, in best sound. Barbie is likely to fare a bit better on Oscar night, but it’s a vivid reminder that as much as the Oscar telecast producers may want to embrace blockbusters, the voters themselves can be a bit more hesitant.
2019: Robert De Niro and The Irishman
The Irishman became infamous in recent Oscar history for earning ten nominations without a single win, but its most egregious snub may have come during the nomination phase, when Robert De Niro was left out of best actor. De Niro, who earned his fourth acting nomination for a Scorsese collaboration this year, was also nominated as a producer for The Irishman, so he and Cruise and Robbie could start quite a club. But his performance as Mob enforcer Frank Sheeran actually had a good bit in common with Robbie’s Barbie.
Both function essentially as straight men in the wild, expansive worlds that surround them, and in scenes with more expressive supporting players (Joe Pesci and Al Pacino, both nominated for The Irishman) they deliberately recede to the background. It’s very hard to pull off that kind of performance without looking passive or dull, and both De Niro and Robbie seem to have been overlooked for “simple” lead performances that were anything but. (There’s a whole mini-genre of titular Oscar snubs in a similar vein: Jamie Foxx in Django Unchained, Dev Patel in Slumdog Millionaire, Michael Stuhlbarg in A Serious Man, Harrison Ford in The Fugitive, and on and on. The fact that very few examples are female is more about the Oscar tendency not to give best picture nominations to movies about women, and that’s a whole other essay.)
2018: Chadwick Boseman and Black Panther
When Black Panther was on its way to making Oscar history as the first superhero ever nominated for best picture, there was certainly more buzz around Michael B. Jordan’s supporting performance than Chadwick Boseman’s steady, soulful work in lead. In the end, neither were nominated, and when Angela Bassett finally broke through in supporting actress for the sequel Wakanda Forever —well, we all remember how that turned out. Like Barbie, Black Panther was the kind of movie the Oscars might not usually go for that became too powerful to ignore — and like Barbie, it found that there was a limit to that embrace.
2013: Tom Hanks and Captain Phillips
And sometimes there’s just no explaining how a high-profile snub happens. Nominated for six Oscars, including best picture and best supporting actor Barkhad Abdi, Captain Phillips was a critical and box office hit in no small part thanks to the colossal lead performance of Tom Hanks, whose emotional breakdown at the end of the film is a high point in an already pretty stellar career. But on nomination morning, Hanks was left out of best actor—and in the past decade we still haven’t really come up with a reasonable explanation for how it happened. It was a tight best actor race that year — this is when Leonardo DiCaprio lost for Wolf of Wall Street, remember — and sometimes even a ton of support can be just not quite enough.
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