Barbie girl in a Barbie world

When I read through the list of the 2023 Oscar nominations on Tuesday and saw that Barbie, the highest grossing movie of the year, was nominated for several awards — including Best Supporting Actor nomination for Ryan Gosling — but Margot Robbie and Greta Gerwig were snubbed for the Best Actress and Best Director awards, I had a flashback to when my daughter was ten and asked me some basic questions on how the world worked.

I’ll get to those questions, but first let me say I’m not a movie geek. I tend to see a few of the Oscar nominated movies each year, but I rarely see them all and my choices of the winners are never the same as the academies. Can someone please tell me why Chris Farley didn’t win the Oscar for Best Actor for Tommy Boy in 1995? A travesty I tell you! A travesty!

For more modern day context, I watched The Holdovers thinking I would love the movie about a Northeast boarding school, but after I saw it, I thought it was nothing special and was even more surprised when I saw that it had earned nominations for Best Picture, Best Actor for Paul Giamatti, and Best Actress in a Supporting Role for Da’Vine Joy Randolph.

Let them know!

So, I admit up front that I’m not a great judge of cinematic art, but I couldn’t help but think back to when my daughter came to me in a huff when she was ten and asked why Nintendo named it’s much loved handheld gaming console, Game Boy, instead of Game Girl. She liked games just as much as the boys in her classes. Where was the gaming console focused on her?

I didn’t have an answer for her. I told her that I didn’t know, but if she wrote a letter to the company, I would write one of my own too and would mail it for her. We would see if we could get answer. Well, of course, no answer came. Nothing changed, there were no big announcements with company leaders all jockeying for position in front of the camera announcing their brave decision to rename the console and plans to make a big fat donation to the education of girls across the world. (Can you imagine, how much great press Nintendo would have gotten from that kind forward thinking decision. Every time their name came up in the news, they would be known as that company that you can trust, the one that did right by girls. And keeping it very real, imagine the money that would have been directed their way. From a business standpoint, it’s a crime the obvious never became a thing.)

Despite their inertia, girl gamers have increasingly become a huge portion of the business. The numbers vary depending on who’s doing the counting, but most sources say the gamer population is broken down now by 54% male and 46% female. Of those females, women 18 and older account for a greater portion of the population than males younger than 18. The average female video game player is 44 years old, while the average male video game player is 35.

In the land of gaming, money talks. It’s a field ripe with sexual stereotypes and innuendos — do I need to call out Grand Theft Auto — but when Nintendo came out with its next generation video game console in 2017, it avoided any male or female references altogether, by naming it the Nintendo Switch. Hmm, maybe someone got smarter.

Make a difference!

I have the same reaction about the Oscars snubbing Barbie. As I told my daughter back in the day, change their thinking, make them regret failing to recognize what was directly in front of their face. In many respects, Barbie has a chance to go down in history like other great movies like Citizen Kane, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Wizard of Oz, Star Wars, E.T., and a host of other movies that were beloved but were robbed of their Oscars. They’re annual reminders that the Oscars doesn’t always get it right.

And while the oversight of Robbie and Gerwig are may be big, I have to point out that the film still received a whopping eight nominations — on par with some of the great movies in time — including nominations for Best Supporting Actor for Ryan Gosling and Best Supporting Actress for America Ferrera. Two of its songs, “I’m Just Ken” and “What Was I Made For?,” made the Best Original Song list, and it was honored for its costume and production design, and for its screenplay. It could also still win Best Picture, even though its chances are diminished without the best actress or director nomination.

Oh, it’s a tough pill to swallow. I don’t mean to belittle how some might feel unrepresented, but I’ve worked in enough bureaucratic cultures to know that change is a long slog and you need to keep reminding the powers that be that they’re myopic viewpoint is failing where it matter most.

Changing opinions one person at a time

In the end it comes down to a simple couple of questions: Did Barbie deserve more nominations? I know I can’t answer that question. However, I do know that hordes of people went to see the movie and most came back touched and talking favorably about the movie.

In any event, here’s hoping Hollywood gets smarter. When they see a 50-plus year old man like myself, who as my father used to say “has no dog in this fight,” and the scores of young girls and women raising questions on the nomination process, that has to make them take notice? Right?

Let’s hope so.