Barbie did one last service to global cinema at the Oscars ceremony on Sunday. Oscars that tried to compensate from the beginning with attention and applause that Robbie and Greta Gerwig were not nominated for the film that brought viewers back to theaters. It is true that Oppenheimer put the awards in a gala slowed down in an insufferable way by the moments between La Voz and self-help in which the veteran actors sing the wonders of each nominated performer, many times of their own ethnicity. But Barbie marked the great moments, especially Ryan Gosling singing throughout the theater I’m just Ken in a fuchsia dress and accompanied by sixty Kens looking, very seductively, for the place of the new masculinities.
It was the climax of a gala that lasted slightly less than the Goyas and in which Kimmel’s humor was acid at times, such as when he recalled that Jodie Foster and Robert De Niro were nominated again 48 years after Taxi driver: “At that time Jodie was so young that she could be his daughter and now she is 20 years too old to be his girlfriend”. And he bordered the limits when he talked about the performances of Sandra Hüller as a woman accused of murdering her husband in Anatomy of a fall and the unfaithful wife of a Nazi and The zone of interest: “In Germany these films are romcoms”, romantic comedies . But in general she maintained a good level: “What a great achievement to get a plastic doll that no one liked is now a feminist icon thanks to Greta Gerwig”, she smiled amid deafening applause. “Applause, but you didn’t vote for her”, he postulated.
Billie Eilish’s performance with her winner What I was made for? was another great moment, and if reuniting the heights of Danny de Vito and Schwarzenegger didn’t add more, and the naked moment of the wrestler John Cena gave just a cute moment for Kimmel ( Dinner: “The Male Body it’s not a joke.” Kimmel: “My, yes”), Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt humorously returned to the battle of the year in their dialogue: “The phenomenon is Barbenheimer and not Oppenbarbie because you always go after the box office”, Gosling told him.
Kimmel played with politics: “Emma Stone embodies a grown woman with a child’s brain, like the replica of the State of the Nation”, alluding to the Republican senator who replicated Biden – at the end, when she read Trump’s tweet in which he called him the “worst presenter in history”, and to this Kimmel replied surprised that he saw the gala: “Isn’t it time for you to go to jail?”. Trump wrote that the gala was disjointed, boring and unfair. Unfair, no: Jonathan Glazer accepted the Oscar for The Zone of Interest denouncing the dehumanization that led to Nazi horror. And also: “As a Jew, I reject the Holocaust being 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 in 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”.
