The Barbie Oscars outrage misses the point

Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie threaded the art-commerce needle incredibly well.

Oh, Barbie. 

I really have no strong feelings about Barbie—which is not to say it’s not worth thinking about. As a film, it was fun and flawed. As a pop-culture and business phenomenon, it’s fascinating! 

Which is part of why it’s stayed in the headlines, half a year after its theatrical release. The latest, as I’m sure you’ve heard, is that director-cowriter Greta Gerwig and star-producer Margot Robbie were nominated for some Oscars—but not for all of the Oscars they were eligible for. Gerwig was passed over for directing, but nominated for writing; Robbie was ignored for acting, but nominated for producing. (That’s the “Best Picture” Academy Award—i.e., the last one of the night, the most important one.) Not to mention Barbie’s six other nominations, none of which would have happened without the director or the producer.

Still, Barbie’s minor Oscars tragedy launched a thousand online takes this week—including one of my own, at Fortune, about how beside the point all this outrage is:

This language of “snubs” takes away some of Gerwig’s agency. And it ignores what I’d argue matters most: The incredibly savvy and successful business choices that both Gerwig and Robbie made with Barbie.

It’s tediously practical, I know, but as a longtime business reporter, I find that almost everything comes back to money and power. And in this respect, Barbie’s women have already won. 

Gerwig pulled off a tremendous balancing act of art and commerce, directing a summer blockbuster—about a toy doll, and also about the boring basics of feminism!—that minted money, won critical acclaim, and started the kind of cultural conversations that Marvel and other franchise seat-fillers rarely see these days. She directed the highest-grossing film of 2023, and became the first solo female director of a film that earned at least $1 billion at the box office. She hit a home run in the ways that matter most in our capitalist society, and she did so without artistically selling out. 

Meanwhile, Robbie—whose production company got Barbie made—has already earned a reported $50 million from its success, plus that Oscar nomination for Best Picture. She, too, will be just fine.

Gerwig and Robbie also did all of this without sacrificing prestige: They made $1.4 billion, and they got their film nominated for eight Academy Awards. They threaded the art-commerce needle incredibly well, and they deserve to be recognized for the choices they made—even (and maybe especially) the ones we don’t know about.

That’s the more nuanced point: Gerwig and Robbie know what they’re doing, and what they chose not to do with Barbie. They have track records of making sharper artistic choices: Robbie previously produced I, Tonya, turning Tonya Harding into a human being, and Promising Young Woman, a Barbie-pink and incredibly dark feminist rager about #MeToo revenge. Gerwig previously directed Lady Bird and Little Women, smaller-scale but critically-lauded indies about (white) girlhood and feminism.

So if they wanted to, I’m confident Gerwig and Robbie could have created a spikier story than what Barbie became. But instead they made the movie that would sell. That would dominate—and that still managed to Trojan Horse some Feminist 101 vocabulary and concepts into a Mattel-approved popcorn flick. 

Threading this art-commerce needle is incredibly tricky, and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anyone else do it so well. It’s a real skill to make art that sells so many tickets while at least trying to do something interesting. And it’s more important than ever in our imploding media world, where profits are paramount and doing good work doesn’t mean you get to do more of it. As we saw this week in Los Angeles—where, on the same day that the Academy Awards announced their nominations, more than 115 of the journalists covering Hollywood’s hometown were laid off.  

In journalism, in book publishing, in Hollywood, in media writ large—and ultimately in capitalism these days—pursuing artistic excellence is so often incompatible with getting paid. So kudos to Gerwig and Robbie for wildly succeeding at the latter, without completely abandoning the former. They figured out the right balance for their movie—and, ultimately, for their own future success.

Lady Bits

—Letter of recommendation. Speaking of Oscar-nominated movies and the opposite end of that profit/prestige spectrum: American Fiction is one of the most deftly funny, surprisingly emotional movies I’ve seen recently. I especially loved how it was quietly about relationships between adult siblings, even if I wish (vague spoiler) that one of those characters, and actors, got to stick around longer. 

—Other Oscar opinions. Unusually for me, I’ve already seen several of this year’s nominated Best Pictures! So far: Oppenheimer was peak Christopher Nolan, for better and worse. (I dare him to someday make a movie in which someone gets to giggle.) Maestro made me go read up on all the real-world accomplishments and dramatic life choices of its two main characters; I wish that more of what made them interesting as human beings was actually shown on-screen. (Also, Carey Mulligan’s prolonged dying-of-cancer scenes started to feel like torture porn. Chemo porn? Anyway, more manipulative than moving.)

—Subscription support. After my first Substack post earlier this month, some of you lovely readers pledged paid subscriptions towards Lady Business. THANK YOU! I am so grateful for your support, especially given [gestures at everything on fire in journalism right now]. Lady Business is still free, but I’ve turned on paid subscriptions on a purely optional basis. If you enjoy this newsletter and would like to support some of the work that goes into it, you can upgrade to a paid monthly or annual subscription or give someone else a membership. Thank you!

—Birth control progress? This week, seven months after President Biden issued an executive order on the contraception health-insurance problems I had earlier investigated for Fortune, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services took more action on the pervasive (and infuriating) problem.

–Monkey business. There’s a global crisis in America’s crucial drug-development pipeline—and it all comes back to smuggled monkeys. My brilliant colleague Erika Fry excels at finding important stories that no one else is telling, and doing the exhaustive and time-consuming work of bringing them to light. That is, it bears repeating this brutal week, what journalism can and should do best.