The Oscars aren't for us (or Barbie either)

What our internet outrage says about us

Did I tell you guys about the time a far-right Calvinist pundit sent her entire community after me on Twitter? She's got half a million followers, and when I called her theology a disaster (I stand by this), she started retweeting my tweets and taking screenshots from Instagram to Twitter. Thousands of vicious comments later (on three platforms), I was ready to quit publishing and public Christianity. Oh, and at the end of it all, she also invited me onto her podcast because, of course, she did.

She attracts internet outrage. She loves it. Outrage pays her bills. The meaner her audience, the more loyal they are to her meanness. She makes people feel superior and better than other people, and that hit of dopamine keeps people returning to her content.

Here's what I know now: She ain't changing one iota. She is rewarded for being a jerk on the internet. She is rewarded for propping up male misogyny. She is rewarded for cloaking control in a religious movement. Maybe there's hope for some audience members, but even then….

As a dog returns to its vomit,
    so fools repeat their folly.
Do you see a person wise in their own eyes?
    There is more hope for a fool than for them. (Proverbs 26:11-12)

What is it about us? Why do we love to rage on the internet?

My timeline lit up this week over Greta and Margot. "Ryan getting nominated for the Oscar is literally the plot of Barbie." Never mind that America Ferrera got nominated for her first Oscar, a rare nod for a Latina in America. Variety and several other outlets that picked up the story made the headlines about her reaction to Margot and Greta instead of how rare, beautiful, and wonderful it is that America, as a woman and Latina, is nominated for an Oscar.

Other threads and tweets raged about how white women couldn't even survive one day getting snubbed, even though nonwhite women have been dealing with this forever. It's tough because some white women never get their flowers, and some white women (usually a particular type of white woman) do. And for the most part, we are still living in a black-white binary in America where brown women rarely get their due. So, these are the cultural moments when gender, race, and economics collide. Everyone is mad at everyone because it's not fair across the board, and that lack of equality is compounded by race and class.

The game is rigged. Barbie invites us to acknowledge that.

The game is rigged for a lot of men as well. Maybe not for Ryan Gosling, but for men from the hood, the trailer park, migrant communities, or men who don't follow traditional masculine values. We don't talk about that enough.

I don't think the rage is wasted, but I do wonder if the anger could be redirected. Not only because our fragile parasympathetic nervous systems hang in the balance, but honestly, did anybody really believe that Barbie would make it into the top film of the year? With Will Ferrell playing a satirical Barbie overlord? I love Barbie; it broke the box office; it was incredible, even with its flaws. But the Oscars are not for Barbie. The Academy does not want Barbie because Barbie is not a serious movie.

Barbie was serious to us. It spoke to us. But the Oscars are not for us. 

The Oscars are for the upper echelon, not the masses. I'm not making a moral judgment here, but what's true is that a cultural smash is not a shoo-in for top-tier awards. You didn't see Scream nominated, did you? The Oscars are not real life. Yes, we love the red carpet¹, and many of you (and our friends in the industry) love watching the Oscars, but it's not for everyone. I didn't even hear one thing about the Oscars until I lived in Los Angeles at the age of 21. No one in my orbit ever talked about the Oscars. We did not care. Because life is a struggle, and we haven't seen these movies. (And that's most of America.) In fact, look at this:

Three hundred thirty-one million people live in America, but not even ten percent of us watch the Oscars. Hollywood and marketers need to start paying attention to what people in the real world care about, what we raise our voices about, what moves us, and what holds us when we are in pain.

The top brass get so out of touch with reality. How could they not? When you live at a certain economic level, you lose proximity to people different from you. I'm not faulting anyone — it's a natural evolution — the zip code you live in, what schools your kids attend, and the extracurriculars you participate in all change what you're connected to and care about. Perhaps the separation can't be helped.

When we talk about representation, we mean there are people in the upper echelon making decisions for and about people who are not in the room. At best, they are guessing what the masses want, and at worst, they judge us for what we like. That's also what made Barbie so powerful. When that door opens up to the boardroom, it's a room full of mostly white men making decisions about what a woman should be and what her image is so they can shape the minds of young generations about womanhood. It's a particular sort of insanity and arrogance. 

And it happens all the time. 

Remember when these clowns got together in Congress to discuss healthcare, and Republicans proposed cutting maternity care in the US (which wtf are they cutting because we don't have maternity care):

Remember it and weep.

Our internet rage tells a story.

What I love most about the Barbie Oscar outrage is that it highlights the importance of intersectionality in the discussion about equality and justice. Should a man win an award for his hilarious, stellar performance and journey out of the patriarchy into sensitivity if the female brainchild isn't eligible? Or should we tell him he doesn't deserve it? Can America Ferrera, one of the few Latina women ever nominated, be enough for us? Or should we spend our energy raging about Margot not getting the nom? I don't know; I'm just asking to highlight that the game is rigged. Only a few folks are thriving out here in these streets.

When it comes to internet outrage, maybe we engage because we have the opportunity now, like never before, to raise our voices. Sometimes, shouting into the ether feels like relief. The bandwagon effect also captures us. I may not participate in the Internet outrage anymore, but I love to see the pain behind the post. It matters, and all that outrage is telling a story. A story about people who don't feel heard, who don't feel seen, and who do not understand why the world works the way it works.

Because the world shouldn't work this way, but it does. So, we plug away in our quiet corners of the Earth, holding on to hope for progress. It is possible. We've seen it; slow and arduous as it is, change is possible.

"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice." Martin Luther King, Jr.

If you know someone in the Barbie discourse, will you share this email with them? Or pass it on to a few besties for discussion? I’d love to hear your thoughts on all things Oscars and Barbie.

Ashley

P.S. Weird Barbie Forever — love you, mean it.

1. I personally will be watching the TikTok videos of the red carpet because it is better than the pre-show.