Last week’s protests over the Academy’s failure to nominate Barbie’s leading actress and director serve as public proof that for many, female accomplishments are only important when they are white and Westernized. The level of outrage over the absence of Oscar nominations for Barbie’s Margot Robbie and Greta Gerwig as Best Actress and Best Director starkly contrasts with the corresponding silence around America Ferrara’s Best Supporting Actress nomination for the same film. It’s as if the failure to nominate two white women for a film based on a white female doll has been an attack on feminism everywhere! Indeed, the disproportionate response to this year’s Oscar nominations serves as a perfect metaphor-within-a-metaphor for how performative feminism has become the vessel for propagating the very problems it seeks to resolve.

Forgoing the celebration of America Ferrera’s nomination for the sake of feminist outrage seems to be the antithesis of the very message Barbie intended to send. Are women so preoccupied with attaining society’s recognition that we’ve forgotten to give it to ourselves?

America Ferrera’s remarkable accomplishment should not be overshadowed for the sake of feminist outrage, especially when that outrage is expressed primarily by white, affluent women.

Ferrera’s performance in Barbie was truly accomplished. In delivering her eponymous monologue, Ferrera managed to quantify and qualify what women everywhere have always been told to dismiss as theory: “It’s literally impossible to be a woman.” As an actress, she was charged with delivering the only non-allegorical feminist argument in Barbie, and she did it in a way that neither antagonized, accused, or complained. Rather, her performance reflected the exasperation and general fatigue that has embodied the feminine experience since the dawn of time.

Barbie’s “snub” is, for many women, proof positive of Ferrera’s point and the entire film itself. However, the widespread belaboring over this has had an unfortunate impact on the media coverage and public recognition surrounding this year’s Oscar nominations. The push notifications from major media outlets focused so much on “Barbie’s snub” that the public could be excused for not knowing that the film’s subtle yet most powerful acting performance was indeed recognized in America Ferrera. Or that feminism had much to celebrate in the Oscar nominations given to other BIPOC women for films other than Barbie.

The lack of attention paid to the nominations of Danielle Brooks, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Lily Gladstone, and many other women leaves one to wonder about the state of modern feminism when female empowerment in a commercially successful film holds more value than female empowerment in reality.

For many women, Oscar’s Barbie snub is a real-life example of the very female adversity Barbie addresses, but we can’t ignore that the conversation is being dominated by white women for the sake of white women. Some of the loudest complaints over the “Barbie snub” have ironically come from the most affluent, successful women in society. It’s interesting that the women who have occupied or who currently occupy leadership positions are the ones most driven to publicly bemoan the lack of recognition of female leaders, as evidenced by a self-serving tweet from Hilary Clinton and LinkedIn posts made by female CEOs and Forbes “30 under 30” recipients.

Female leaders should be celebrating the less-recognized women nominated for Oscars this year, not engaging in this exclusive, performative feminism. The overwhelming irony of all of this is that Barbie addresses the flaw of a utopian society in which all women automatically occupy leadership positions and are automatically successful at everything they do. In “Barbieland,” the women ultimately fail to derive satisfaction from their accomplishments because they have no autonomy in achieving them. The movie is a fantastic metaphor for how performative feminism endangers the very goals it seeks to attain. Society’s latest reaction is unfortunate proof that, while Barbie’s message sounded the alarm, many have yet to awaken.