Whoopi Goldberg Defends Oscars After Margot Robbie, Greta Gerwig Fail to Score Nominations: 'They're Not Snubs'

Whoopi Goldberg is giving her two cents about Barbie star Margot Robbie and director Greta Gerwig being left out of the Oscars 2024's Best Actress and Best Director nominations.

The EGOT winner, who previously won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in 1990's Ghost, said on Wednesday's episode of The View, "Here’s the deal: Everybody doesn’t win!"

"You know about the snubs ... " said Sunny Hostin, to which Goldberg, 68, responded, "Well, but they’re not snubs. And that’s what I want to sort of point out."

"And it’s not the elites — it’s the entire family of the Academy who vote for Best Picture nominations. We all vote for Best Picture, everybody," she went on. "So there are seven to 10 nominations that happen, and you don’t get everything that you want to get."

"There are no snubs, and that’s what you have to keep in mind: Not everybody gets a prize," Goldberg continued. "The movies you love may not be loved by the people who are voting."

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While Goldberg and Hostin's co-panelist Alyssa Farah Griffin expressed her excitement over Ryan Gosling landing a Best Supporting Actor nod and praised his "allyship," she added of the Academy, "Did thy miss the whole moral of the story of Barbie?"

"Of course we celebrate just Ken and not the woman who is the lead it in and the icon in it?" said Griffin, 34. "But actually, I think this could give Greta an idea for a sequel. Barbie goes to Hollywood and is snubbed by the elites who chose Ken over her. So just throwing that out there for an idea."

She also noted how Barbie, which was the highest-grossing movie of 2023, made "over a billion dollars" at the box office. (According to Box Office Mojo, the global total sits around $1.45 billion.)

"Like, 'Hello, studios, maybe hire more female directors if you want to produce blockbusters,' " Farah said. "We’re half the population; we turn out, we want to see these."

Despite not being named as a Best Actress nominee at this year's Oscars, Robbie, 33, has secured numerous awards this year for her lead role in Barbie, including acting nods at both the Golden Globe Awards and Critics Choice Awards. She is eligible for an Oscar this year as a co-producer of the film, since it is up for Best Picture.

In previous years, Gerwig — who co-wrote Barbie alongside her now-husband Noah Baumbach — landed a Best Director nod for 2017's Lady Bird, her debut, though she was not nominated for her other film, 2019's Little Women. She did earn writing nods for both of those films.

For Barbie, Gerwig, 40, earned directing nominations from the Directors Guild of America, Golden Globes and Critics Choice Awards earlier this year. She and Baumbach, 54, are nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay at the upcoming Oscars.

There were many nominations Tuesday that showcased a notably diverse class of nominees. Among the history-making nods this year are Killers of the Flower Moon Best Actress hopeful Lily Gladstone, who is the the first Native American actress to be nominated for an Oscar. Many other stars are also marking their first-ever Oscar acting nods, including Emily Blunt, Jeffrey Wright, Sterling K. Brown, America Ferrera and Cillian Murphy.

Nine women are up for awards in the Best Picture category, and one woman — Anatomy of a Fall's Justine Triet — is in contention for Best Director.

Triet, 45, is the eighth woman to be nominated in the category (only three have won: Jane Campion in 2021, Chloé Zhao in 2020 and Kathryn Bigelow in 2009). And one-third of nominees across all categories this year are women — higher than the last three years.

Following the nominations announcement on Tuesday, Gosling, 43, issued a strong statement in support of Robbie and Gerwig. “To say that I'm disappointed that they are not nominated in their respective categories would be an understatement," he said about the pair.

While the dad of two added that he was “extremely honored to be nominated,” Gosling said that there is “no Ken without Barbie. And there is no Barbie movie without Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie.”

He went on to call Gerwig and Robbie "the two people most responsible for this history-making globally celebrated film.”

Ferrera, who played Gloria in the film, also revealed that she was “incredibly disappointed” her fellow female colleagues did not receive mentions.

The actress, 39, told Variety, “Greta has done just about everything that a director could do to deserve it. Creating this world, and taking something that didn’t have inherent value to most people and making it a global phenomenon. It feels disappointing to not see her on that list.”

As for Robbie, who has received two Oscar acting nominations in the past (Best Actress for I, Tonya in 2018 and Best Supporting Actress for Bombshell in 2019), Ferrera told the outlet that what she achieved as an actress is “truly unbelievable" in Barbie.

"One of the things about Margot as an actress is how easy she makes everything look. And perhaps people got fooled into thinking that the work seems easy," the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants star said.

"But Margot is a magician as an actress in front of the screen, and it was one of the honors of my career to get to witness her pull off the amazing performance she did," Ferrera added to Variety.

The 96th Academy Awards, hosted by Jimmy Kimmel, will air live on Sunday, March 10, from the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, California, beginning at 7 p.m. ET.