Anyone seeking to understand how the internet works in 2024 need only glance at the many charged conversations around Barbie’s Academy Award nominations. Averting one’s eyes, though, may understandably be more preferable.

That a film based on the most famous doll of all time—no disrespect to Raggedy Ann or Chucky—managed to score eight Oscar nods, on top of being the year’s top grosser and a critical hit, would have probably seemed preposterous a year ago. What should have been a victory lap when those nominations were announced on Tuesday immediately devolved into several concurrent vectors of outrage, stemming from the nominations the film didn’t get. Some of these arguments have merit; others seemed more forced than a doll posed in various contortions. The discourse was so prevalent, just about everyone felt the need to say something about it, like baseball fans getting swept up in a stadium wave. (Yes, as the author of this post, I’m aware I am doing this right now.)

Here is a comprehensive overview of the post-Oscar nominations hullabaloo around Barbie, a microcosm of why internet culture stays forever pitched at an uproar.

THE OBVIOUS ARGUMENT

The postmodern world of Barbie is divided between the real world and Barbieland, where the patriarchy does not exist. The tension between these two realities provides the dramatic engine for the film, along with the bulk of its social commentary—a sentence that, again, would have been stunning to read one year ago in reference to a movie about Barbie. That the male lead of the film, Ryan Gosling, earned a nomination for his efforts while neither the actual star (Margot Robbie) nor the director whose vision is evident in every frame (Greta Gerwig) were nominated seems like obvious proof of the film’s thesis. Many certainly took it that way.

Unfortunately, this opinion is so obvious that it comes off as trite. It leaves out the fact that Gosling had the showier, more comedic role—one that was shunted into the supporting category, where it had better competitive odds, even though Ken is absolutely the male lead.

It would take a lot of strenuous logic avoidance, though, to pretend not to understand why many of the film’s ardent supporters came to this conclusion and were fired up about it. That didn’t seem to stop anyone, though.

CONSOLATION TURNS INTO CONFLICT

Robbie and Gerwig’s respective best actress and best director snubs were not without some silver linings. The film’s eight total nods are clearly a reflection of the pair’s stellar collaboration, and as coproducers they could both potentially earn trophies if Barbie manages to pull off a long-shot best picture win. Robbie and Gerwig technically weren’t “snubbed,” because they share a nomination for a separate award. Furthermore, Anatomy of a Fall filmmaker Justine Triet made the cut for best director, suggesting Hollywood doesn’t entirely disregard women when doling out awards in this category (just the vast majority of them).

Instead of offering these points in a “look on the bright side” way, commenters on X and purveyors of think pieces used them to argue the non-snubs had nothing to do with sexism and that anyone who thinks so isn’t thinking hard enough. It used to take a while for the backlash to the backlash to build in conversations like this one, but now it happens instantly.

A WORLD BEYOND BARBIE

Can two things be true at the same time? The debate rages on. In the case of post-nomination outrage around Barbie, though, a lot of people felt it was an either-or situation. To wit, a lot of social media observers and writers landed on a “Why are we mad about Barbie when x is happening?” construction. The x in some instances referred to world events, and in others meant Oscar outcomes, like Lily Gladstone’s historic first for Native Americans and a surprise nod for America Ferrera for her role in Barbie.

But while the world events in question are undeniably deserving of constant coverage, it’s unrealistic to expect that nobody should ever be upset about anything else. Just because people are upset about the Robbie-Gerwig snubs at the very moment they come to light neither precludes nor diminishes the celebration around Gladstone’s triumph. There is no bandwidth limit on the number of conversational topics allowed to unfold online, and Gladstone will have a lengthy turn in the limelight on the path toward a potential win on Oscar night.

HILLARY CLINTON WEIGHS IN

Just at the moment the discourse seemingly couldn’t get any more unruly, Hillary Clinton entered the chat. Her post on X presented the Barbie snubs as a reflection of the 2016 election, infusing the ongoing conversation with chaos-goblin energy.

While it makes sense that random social media users and writers would be fully engaged in this topic, one could reasonably expect a former world leader to invest their attention elsewhere. For such a fraught public figure to take up the most obvious point about the Barbie snubs—and make it about herself—was too much to ignore. Anyone who had not yet expressed an opinion about the film a full 24 hours after the nominations were announced could no longer sit on the sidelines. Scrolling through social channels and not seeing Barbie or Hillary commentary became damn near impossible. At least we got some memes out of it.

WHO CARES? BARBIE IS BAD

Finally, there was nowhere to go other than to dismiss the movie altogether. Many people were already sick of the long tail of Barbie conversations well before the nominations were announced, but the toxic vibes of the back-and-forth that followed made it a perfect time to say so out loud. “Barbie is bad. There, I said it,” reads a New York Times op-ed headline responding to the uproar. Its author is joined by countless less-pedigreed opinion-havers, eager to let the world know that they didn’t like the “toy commercial,” as if that attack line weren’t something Gerwig and cowriter Noah Baumbach anticipated and baked into the film.

Though I personally considered Barbie an entertaining, funny, and thoughtful answer to an impossibly challenging creative brief, I understand the inclination to wash one’s hands of it at this point. The extremely 2024 discourse around the film is enough to make one wish Amy Schumer had ended up making her doomed version of it instead.