Might I Suggest a Few Totally Normal Ways to React to Barbie’s Oscar Nominations

Tuesday morning might have been normal for you, but it was not normal for white women across the United States of America. It was their January 6, the day that will live in infamy, the day that Reese Witherspoon covered a political insurrection at the United States Capitol building while sick with COVID-19 and ran into her idiot brother protesting the free and fair election of President Joe Biden. (Sorry, once again, if you are not watching The Morning Show you really should be watching The Morning Show.)¹ This week, Barbie was nominated for eight Oscars — including Best Picture, Adapted Screenplay, Supporting Actress and Supporting Actor — but Margot Robbie was not nominated for Best Actress and Greta Gerwig was not nominated for Best Director.

If you spend 30 seconds on the internet or in close proximity to a Kendra Scott store, this might have enraged you. It might have even radicalized you! Here is a movie about the fullness of women’s lives and a man (and America Ferrera) were its nominated actors. That sucks! But also, let’s be serious please: we are speaking about the Oscars. The modern-day Academy Awards have awarded a movie about a woman romancing a fish-man (The Shape of Water) and movie about an interracial friendship where the white friend heard about racism and basically stayed racist (Green Book). Director Bong said it best: “The Oscars are not an international film festival. They’re very local.”²

I enjoyed Barbie! I believe it was one of the year’s best-directed movies, a movie that works wonderfully and rather improbably³, a real movie-movie, a big achievement. But grips need to be gotten: here are a few normal ways to react to the billion-dollar-grossing biggest movie of the year getting nominated for eight Oscars but not ten. We’ll call it service journalism.

• “I will be speaking to my therapist, Dr. Fat Joe, about this.” This might only apply if you are Jennifer Lopez, who is no stranger to snubs.

• “Dang that’s crazy, but after Lady Bird lost every Oscar it was nominated for something so deep in my core was broken that I cannot believe anything as transcendent as Moonlight winning Best Picture will ever happen again.” This is, admittedly, my way.

• The stalwart reality check: “This affects my life not even a little bit, like barely at all.” And I say this as a person who lives and breathes to watch movies. Barbie is a movie; the Oscars is a television program. Awards let you do things in Hollywood, but money lets you do more things in Hollywood. (And if we’re really talking about snubs, like true snubs, like not even nominated at all snubs: Teyana Taylor in A Thousand and One or Franz Rogowski in Passages.)

• “I hope Hillary Clinton doesn’t have her phone right now,” which is a normal although unexpected reaction because I am really of the opinion that nothing helpful comes from Hillary Clinton tweeting.⁴ Unfortunately, Hillary Clinton did have her phone and decided to tweet.

  I do think this is a rare circumstance in which maybe there actually is a wide-ranging conspiracy, and Hillary Clinton and Margot Robbie’s stylist are in on it, because why is my sister taking so many Ls? 

• And the last way, perhaps the superior way: Eva Mendes saying my man my man my man.

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Eva Mendes on Instagram: “So proud of my man. So much hate when he took on this role. So many people trying to shame him for doing it. Despite all the #Notmyken ridicule and articles written about him, he created this completely original, hilarious,heartbreaking, now iconic character and took it all the way to Oscars. So beyond proud to be this Ken’s Barbie 💕”

January 27, 2024

“So proud of my man. So much hate when he took on this role,” she posted on IG, captioning a carousel of screenshots from a news post reacting to Ryan Gosling’s first photo as Ken. “So many people trying to shame him for doing it. Despite all the #Notmyken ridicule and articles written about him, he created this completely original, hilarious, heartbreaking, now iconic character and took it all the way to Oscars. So beyond proud to be this Ken’s Barbie 💕”

What I love about this, besides the fact that Eva Mendes was waiting on you at the door, is that she took the time to find that marker tool in Preview and highlight the specific lines that she didn’t appreciate.

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What the paid list got this week
A big long discussion on Oscar nominations, with a lot of really thoughtful, provocative thoughts from commenters. My favorite was “iron claw shutout from oscar noms AND hunter harris newsletter...the pain never ends!” and this piece of information that finally made me kind of understand Past Lives: “Past Lives is for me (people who can't block their exes out of inexplicable guilt).”

You can read here and subscribe here.

Club Chalamet Standing on Business
On Thursday, the Timothée Chalamet stan account Club Chalamet posted a random update on IG. “When I was 26, I looked 26. Today, some 26 year olds look 42,” Simone, the self-described “GenX LA based super fan”/woman behind the curtain of Hung Up’s favorite stan account wrote. “That sucks for them.” 

I’m sure you will be surprised to learn that 26 happens to be the age of Kylie Jenner, Chalamet’s girlfriend, whom Club Chalamet has nicknamed “Slurpee.” Club Chalamet herself is either 47 or 57, depending on how good I am at math. (She is definitely one of those ages, which are perhaps both too old to be running a stan account, but let she that has never boxed with 19-year-olds on Twitter cast the first stone and all that…) 

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I love this lady.⁵ My heart does a little flutter every time I check her page.

That’s all this week! Thank you for reading. This weekend I will do everything in my power to not have to hear that new Justin Timberlake song ever again. Have a good weekend!