Not for the first time, Hillary Clinton is outraged. Reacting to the news that Barbie star, Margot Robbie, and the film’s director, Greta Gerwig, missed out on Oscar nominations, Clinton sent a message to the pair: ‘Greta & Margot, while it can sting to win the box office but not take home the gold, your millions of fans love you. You’re both so much more than Kenough.’

But the truth is that sexism isn’t to blame for the decision to snub Barbie. The reason Barbie won’t be picking up many gongs at the Oscars is that it just isn’t a very good film.

The way Barbie deals with its central feminist conceit is clunky

Barbenheimer fever, which reached its zenith last summer, was a thrilling time for film fans. Two major blockbusters – Barbie and Oppenheimer – were scheduled to be released on the same day – 23 July – and, in a rare example of marketing teams jumping on viral trends and actually getting it right, the Barbenheimer phenomenon was born. Aside from the millions of dollars worth of free advertising it afforded both films’ Hollywood studios, mostly in the form of viral memes, Barbenheimer also had a more profound impact on movie culture; it showed that men and women alike are capable of enjoying World War Two films and bright, shiny, cartoonish pop-culture films in equal measure.

Like lots of men, I needed little persuasion to see a Christopher Nolan three-hour biopic on the father of the atomic bomb. Conversely, when I first heard about the Barbie movie, I paid little attention. It was only later, as it became clear that Barbie was not going to be just another pre-teen movie about yet another beloved children’s character did I become intrigued. The marketing promised that this Barbie movie would be grown up, even – dare I say it – edgy. A genuinely counter-cultural take on a piece of pop-culture iconography sounded like a film worth seeing.

Oppenheimer was a genuine surprise. Yes, it was long and verbose and rather devoid of action when compared with Nolan’s previous work, but the slow burning, mostly internal melodrama of Oppenheimer’s work on the atomic project was gripping.

Sitting in the cinema a few days later, my excitement was soon tempered. Barbie is a fun film and it has a lot going for it. It’s witty and offers a lot of effective satire about the ridiculous perfection of a doll and the world she inhabits. I even appreciated the feminist bent of the movie and the way it attempted to engage with the question of Barbie’s place in a more modern world, where young girls are more interested in an app on their iPhone than playing with dolls.

But the film is no classic. The writing is clunky, and you are constantly aware when watching it that this is a movie and everything is happening according to a script. The characters seem glued to a conveyor belt moving inexorably towards a predetermined conclusion at an unbelievably consistent pace. Plot points and scenes don’t seem to come about naturally. Instead, you get the sense that the plot is something that is happening to the characters, rather than being driven by them.

The way Barbie deals with its central feminist conceit is just as clunky. Characters talk about ‘the patriarchy’ as if they are reading lines dictated to them by a script rather than having any internal motivation to do so. Even America Ferrera’s much feted monologue about the challenges of being a woman acts against the movie’s interests; it feels forced and unnatural, as though everything that has happened in the preceding half-hour has been dictated to bring us to this moment. Of course, it has, but in a great film you shouldn’t feel you are aware of it. You can’t help but come away feeling that Gerwig, making a film for and about women, doesn’t trust them enough to understand its satire. What is intended to be the emotional core of the film instead made me suddenly deeply aware that I was sitting in a cinema watching something that has been written, filmed and edited by a whole crew of people.

The outrage this week that Nolan was included in the Oscars Best Director nominee list while Barbie director Greta Gerwig wasn’t, ignores a crucial fact. Barbie is a good movie, but it isn’t great. Greta Gerwig’s directorial debut, Lady Bird, is a brilliant coming-of-age film and her version of Little Women, released in 2019, was exceptionally well done. As a filmmaker, the way Gerwig deals with bringing Barbie to life as an icon finding her place in the modern age is truly brilliant, but it’s a brilliance that loses its shine when you look at the movie as a whole.

Much of the ire over Gerwig’s exclusion from the Best Director nominations (and Margot Robbie’s omission from the Best Actress category) seems to centre around ‘optics’. Gerwig and Robbie being snubbed appears, for some Barbie fans, to prove the central point of the film. Never mind that there are more films directed by women up for Best Picture than ever before.

Perhaps the greatest piece of evidence that Barbie ultimately missed its mark is the success of ‘I’m Just Ken’, sung in the film by Ken (Ryan Gosling). Over the summer, it quickly became the most viral clip from the film, sparking a Pete Davidson Saturday Night Live parody and even winning a Critic’s Choice Award for Best Original Song. If a film about fighting the patriarchy finds its audience connecting most strongly with its literal representation of the patriarchy, then perhaps it hasn’t set out to do what it intended to do – and that’s fine. Barbie is an enjoyable film, and it still means a great deal to a lot of people; it just isn’t good enough to win an Oscar.