Barbie provided one last service to global cinema on Sunday at the Oscars ceremony. Some Oscars that tried to compensate from the beginning with attention and applause for the fact that Robbie and Greta Gerwig were not nominated for the film that brought viewers back to theaters. It is true that Oppenheimer made the awards of a gala weighed down in an unbearable way by the moments between The Voice and Self-Help in which veteran actors sing the wonders of each nominated performer, often of the same ethnicity. But Barbie marked the great moments, especially Ryan Gosling singing I’m just Ken throughout the theater in a fuchsia suit and accompanied by 60 Kens looking, very seductively, for the place of new masculinities.
It was the climax of a gala that lasted a little less than the Goya and in which Kimmel’s humor was often acidic, as when remembering that Jodie Foster and Robert de Niro were nominated again 48 years after Taxi Driver: “So Jodie “She was so young she could have been his daughter and now she is 20 years too old to be his girlfriend.” And he touched the limits when talking about Sandra Hüller’s performances as a wife accused of murdering her husband in Anatomy of a Fall and an unfaithful wife of a Nazi in The Zone of Interest: “In Germany those films are rom-coms,” romantic comedies. But in general he maintained a good level: “What a success to make a plastic doll that no one liked now become a feminist icon thanks to Greta Gerwig,” he smiled to thunderous applause. “You applaud, but you haven’t voted for her,” he added.
Billie Eilish’s performance with her winner What I was made for? It was another great moment, and if reuniting the heights of Danny de Vito and Schwarzenegger did not contribute more, and the naked moment of the fighter John Cena gave just a sympathetic moment for Kimmel (Cena: “The male body is not a joke.” Kimmel: “Mine yes”), Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt returned the battle of the year with humor in their dialogue: “The phenomenon is Barbenheimer and not Oppenbarbie because you are always behind at the box office,” Gosling snapped.
A ceremony in which Kimmel played with the initial politics in an election year – “Emma Stone embodies an adult woman with a child’s brain, like the replica of the State of the Nation,” in reference to the Republican senator who responded to Biden– Finally, when he read Trump’s tweet calling him the “worst presenter in history,” Kimmel replied, surprised that he saw the gala: “Isn’t it your time to go to jail?” Trump wrote that the gala was disjointed, boring and unfair. Not unfair: Jonathan Glazer accepted the Oscar for The Zone of Interest, denouncing the dehumanization that led to Nazi horror. And more: “I reject as a Jew that the Holocaust is hijacked by an occupation that has brought so many innocent people into the conflict, be they the victims of October 7 or those of the attack on Gaza.” Cillian Murphy recalled that “we live in Oppenheimer’s world and I would like to dedicate the award to those who fight for peace.”
