Talk show host Bill Maher poked fun at people outraged by actress Margot Robbie being left off the Oscars’s Best Actress category for her role in Barbie.
Robbie played the titular role in the film, which has been nominated for the Best Picture category. Director Greta Gerwig was similarly left off from the Best Director group, but the film has nabbed a total of eight Oscars nominations.
“If you know a rich blonde bombshell, give her a hug,” Maher responded to the news during his opening monologue on Real Time with Bill Maher.
The sweeping popularity of the movie led many people online to complain that Robbie and Gerwig were snubbed in their respective categories.
“I don’t know why this is such a giant controversy now,” Maher said. “I mean, best actress. That’s the category, you know, [Robbie] lost to other actresses. It’s not like they gave her slot to Vin Diesel. Is this really the patriarchy?”
Maher went even further, offering criticisms of the film.
“I googled what the Mattel board really was. In the movie, it’s 12 men; in real life, it’s seven men and five women, so they were caught lying in their own movie,” Maher said. “I remember I saw it [the movie] in the theater, and I liked it, it’s entertaining, but at one point, the Barbies have to like, win back the Kens, and they do it by acting helpless. And the woman I was with said, ‘I don’t know any woman today who would do that.’”
Barbie went on to make $502.6 million in its first three weeks, which marked it as the highest-grossing film by a female director domestically. It made over $1 billion overall, while only three of the 53 films in history to surpass $1 billion in international sales featured female directors.
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Should the Barbie movie win the Best Picture category, Robbie will still receive an Oscar, as she was also a producer on the film. Gerwig could similarly take home an Oscar if the film takes the Best Adapted Screenplay category as the film’s writer.
The film has already won a Golden Globe award for Cinematic and Box Office Achievement. The songs featured in the film were also nominated for Grammy awards and Golden Globes, with Billie Eilish winning a Golden Globe for the song “What Was I Made For,” which is also nominated for an Oscar, along with “I’m Just Ken.”
