“If I were the front-runner, I’d be worried.” These words, spoken back in 2013 by an Academy voter during the tumultuous Oscar season, were in reaction to a perennial phenomenon that has arisen again: a conspicuous snub. This time, there are two of them.

The final weeks of Hollywood’s awards race are always when the friendly rivalries turn hostile, the whisper campaigns become deafening, and the currents and conventional wisdom can abruptly shift. This year Oppenheimer heads toward the Academy Awards ceremony as the proverbial front-runner, with 13 nominations, including best picture and best director for Christopher Nolan. But when the nominations were announced this week, much of the chatter was focused on two people who were left out.

Barbie cowriter and director Greta Gerwig was conspicuously absent from the directing category, while the movie’s star and producer, Margot Robbie, was left out of the best-actress contenders. (Notably, Gerwig is nominated for her screenplay, while Robbie shares the best-picture nomination, so both remain Oscar nominees.) Their snubs in those specific categories might seem ominous for the movie’s best-picture prospects, but history shows that a film’s campaign for the top prize can be galvanized by glaring omissions. Gerwig in particular may not have been on the directing short list, but she ruled the headlines nonetheless: “Oppenheimer dominates the Oscar nominations, as Gerwig is left out for best director,” read the NPR story.

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To be clear, Team Oppenheimer hasn’t taken anything away from Team Barbie. After the two settled on the same release date, the “Barbenheimer” craze seemingly benefited both of them immeasurably. Robbie and Oppenheimer actor Cillian Murphy even joined forces for Variety’s Actor on Actors video series, and after so much critical acclaim and box office success, both films were destined to have a major presence at the Academy Awards. And they do. It’s just that two key players from Barbie didn’t make the cut, leaving outsiders agog with disbelief. How did this happen?

We call it a “snub” when a favorite is left out, but the nomination process is really more like a game of musical chairs, with more worthy honorees than there are slots. Academy voters like to mix things up and spread around their support, motivated by a sense of fairness and a desire to use their ballot to do something meaningful. And that doesn’t change in phase two, when voters get the chance to see what’s already on the ballot, what might be missing, and put their support behind something that was snubbed on nominations morning.

After all, it’s happened before.

In the Oscar race for the films of 2012, there was something for everybody—history with Lincoln, action with Zero Dark Thirty, heartbreak with Amour, and indie grit with Beasts of the Southern Wild. But everyone seemed to agree that the movie with the complete package was Argo, the based-on-a-true-story thriller that earned seven Oscar nominations…but no directing nod for director Ben Affleck.

That shocking snub motivated that anonymous voter to say, “If I were the front-runner, I’d be worried.” At that point the perceived front-runner was Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, with 12 nominations and a slam dunk best-actor contender in Daniel Day-Lewis. But after nominations morning, Argo became the David facing down the Goliaths of Lincoln, Les Mis, and Life of Pi, all of which went on to collect other top awards. On the day of the nominations, Affleck’s directing absence was viewed by pundits as a sign that Argo lacked support, but in the days and weeks to follow, outrage over the snub turned into a kind of underdog enthusiasm that ultimately vaulted Argo to a best-picture victory.

How exactly did it happen? Voters detected unfairness, and they wanted to fix it. Affleck and Team Argo couldn’t control that, but they made some key decisions that helped their cause.

Affleck, for his part, responded to the discourse with humor and humility. “I mean, I also didn’t get the acting nomination. And no one’s saying I got snubbed there!” he said backstage at the Golden Globes, holding the prize for directing.

It was his allies, meanwhile, who could speak more openly on his behalf. The recently passed Alan Arkin, who received a supporting-actor mention for his work on the film, said this in reaction: “The main concern outside of the initial joy was wishing that Ben had been given a nod. It’s an absolutely perfect film in every way, and he’s responsible for it.”

George Clooney, who produced Argo, joined the clapback by invoking sympathy for Affleck, who had made a filmmaking comeback after a string of critically panned flops like Gigli. “Part of the reason there’s such admiration for Ben at this stage is because he was in actor jail,” Clooney said in the Golden Globes pressroom. “I did Batman & Robin—trust me, I know. It’s how you handle yourself when things aren’t going particularly well. He directed his way out of this. I can’t tell you how proud we are to have worked with him—and how much I hate him.”

Sometimes contenders who had nothing to do with Argo joined the chorus. Bradley Cooper, nominated this year for his acting in Maestro and his work on the original screenplay (but not for his directing), was a first-time acting contender in 2013—for Silver Linings Playbook—when he called in to the Today show and started his interview with: “I do have to say real quick, Ben Affleck got robbed.”

By Oscar night, Argo was the front-runner for best picture. Ang Lee took home the best-director award for Life of Pi, his second, but even before a streamed-in Michelle Obama opened the best-picture envelope, most expected Argo to be the ultimate winner—and a classic comeback kid.

Meanwhile, back in 2024, Barbie’s allies are already rallying. Amongst fans and costars, the discourse has shifted to: Gerwig and Robbie were robbed.

Ryan Gosling, nominated for supporting actor for his role as Ken, has made his disappointment clear. “There is no Ken without Barbie, and there is no Barbie movie without Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie, the two people most responsible for this history-making, globally celebrated film,” he wrote in a statement on nominations day. “No recognition would be possible for anyone on the film without their talent, grit, and genius. To say that I’m disappointed that they are not nominated in their respective categories would be an understatement.”

America Ferrera, a supporting-actress nominee for Barbie, added to the chorus in an interview with NBC’s Today show: “It’s really a disappointment. It’s just so undeniable what they created.”

The disappointment has been clear, but the tone in which it’s expressed has varied. There is a risk of leaning too far into outrage and inviting a counterbacklash.

Eva Mendes, Gosling’s romantic partner and the mother of his two children, took to Instagram to lambaste a nearly two-year-old Rolling Stone article that declared that Gosling was “giving major cringe as Ken.” It was an odd revival of some very old snark, and had the appearance of punching down on a writer who eventually came around on the movie—but at least it wasn’t as instantly polarizing as Hillary Clinton’s effort to join the conversation.

Gerwig’s and Robbie’s respective snubs will probably always be head-spinning, but now it’s a question of whether that sentiment will endure and be focused enough to help Barbie pull off an Argo.

Voters love to feel like they are righting a wrong. The likeliest place for Gerwig to be honored is in the adapted-screenplay category, where she is nominated alongside her cowriter (and husband), Noah Baumbach. But Barbie’s vibrant and emotional script was already greatly beloved, and could well have taken the adapted-screenplay award anyway. As a make-good, that might not seem like enough.

Argo was, in many ways, an anomaly. It was neither the first nor last best-picture contender to leave its director empty-handed, and usually even the most ballyhooed snubs don’t lead directly to a best-picture win. In 2022, Denis Villeneuve’s Dune received 10 Academy Award nominations, only behind the 12 nods garnered by The Power of the Dog—but Villeneuve was shut out of the directing category, despite being universally praised for the overall scope of the project. (He and Gerwig would probably have a lot to discuss about making giant movies that people love but the Academy doesn’t.) Dune lost best picture to CODA—another film without a director nomination—but it did win six Oscars, more than any other film that year.

Director snubs are nothing new, but they do seem to be irresistible as talking points. Back in 1990, Driving Miss Daisy director Bruce Beresford was left out of the directing category even though his film went on to win best picture. Billy Crystal, the night’s host, made special mention of 80-year-old best-actress hopeful (and eventual winner) Jessica Tandy in his opening monologue. “She, of course, is nominated for Driving Miss Daisy, the movie that apparently directed itself.” Crystal's crack received a smattering of “oooohs” along with laughter, but he still liked the joke well enough to recycle it two years later.

When 1991’s The Prince of Tides received seven nominations, including best picture, director Barbra Streisand was overlooked. Returning host Crystal invoked her exclusion in his opening musical melody, singing to the tune of Streisand’s famous “Don’t Rain on My Parade”: “Seven nominations on the shelf…did this film diii-rect itself?”

Streisand had already been famously snubbed years earlier, for her directorial debut, Yentl, and her exclusion for The Prince of Tides loomed so large that in 2010 she was chosen by the Academy to present the best-director Oscar; the award went to Hurt Locker filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow, the category’s first female winner, who was correctly predicted as the surefire victor. Streisand, like Gerwig and Affleck, was an actor before she became a director, and she was overlooked even as her ’90s director peers Mel Gibson and Kevin Costner took home multiple Oscars.

Did sexism undermine Streisand in the directing category? Did the same thing happen again to Gerwig? Voters seldom acknowledge such negative impulses, but the whole point of Barbie was to explore the various ways men can be oblivious and the extraordinary effort women often expend to achieve their dreams anyway.

Barbie spoke powerfully about these things, and now Gerwig’s and Robbie’s absences seem to be saying something too. Voters will have the final word—and sometimes they decide to change the conversation.