The most introspective, Shakespearean, and classically liberal film of the last year was not, in fact, Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, a tour de force biopic of the inventor of the atomic bomb. In a feat all too rare for Hollywood these days, the best critical feat of the year was also the biggest blockbuster.
With a total box-office haul of some $1.5 billion, Barbie was theoretically tailor-made to sweep the Academy Awards. Barbie‘s ultimate conclusion rejects identity politics in a way that delighted audiences across blue and red America alike, as Margot Robbie’s eponymous protagonist rejects the matriarchy of Barbieland for our own messy and egalitarian reality. But still, from record-breaking director and writer Greta Gerwig to Robbie as the consummate leading lady, the film seemed to hit the sweet spot of commercial gold and critical adoration that usually enchants the Academy.
And yet, Barbie was snubbed. Justifiably enough, the academy awarded best picture and best director to Oppenheimer, which was arguably as deserving and more ostentatiously epic and elegiac in the way the aesthetics of the Oscars tend to recompense. But the real outrage resulted from the Academy’s decision not to nominate Robbie for best actress at all, instead awarding the penultimate prize of the night to Emma Stone for Poor Things.
This single snub only warrants notice because of how broadly similar the narratives of Barbie and Poor Things are. Both films are ostensibly about female liberation, but whereas Barbie escapes a pristine matriarchy through her own discovery and agency, Stone’s Bella Baxter in Poor Things is a creation and product of man in every way. Resurrected by a man into the body of an adult woman with the brain of a literal infant, Baxter spends most of her growth naked on screen, having graphic sex, only to conclude with her ambiguously dumping one man for another. A male-directed, male-written story about a bunch of men who create and then copulate with a character who has less agency than a plastic doll.
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Harvey Weinstein may be long gone from Hollywood, locked up behind bars decades too late for raping his way across town, but evidently, the academy still plays by his rules. It was the disgraced producer who made gluttonous campaign spending required to win favor with the academy, and it was indeed Weinstein who mainstreamed sexploitation, rehabilitating the sort of soft porn once reserved for HBO after-hours into near-requirements for any film wishing to appear highfalutin enough for the academy. (It is no coincidence that countless actresses like Salma Hayek would later reveal that Weinstein bullied and berated them into graphic nude scenes under the guise of “art.”)
So when faced with two undeniably talented actresses telling a different version of a similar story, of course the academy chooses the one whose body is quite literally stripped and salivated over by men. For all that the industry pretends to be beyond #MeToo, the supposed feminists of Hollywood still cannot fathom celebrating a beautiful young actress for merely acting rather than mutilating or prostituting herself for the male gaze.
