A Seriously Silly Oscars Moment
Must songs written for movies be serious? Each year the Oscar for Best Original Song nominations over-index on hushed ballads and motivational anthems—music that’s built sturdily, predictably, for utilitarian purposes. “I’m Just Ken,” the Barbie track performed by the actor Ryan Gosling, takes that tradition and skews it. Part piano confessional and part prog-metal rockout, it’s a deeply silly song about self-seriousness. Last night’s rendition of it was an irony-meets-sincerity cyclone of the highest order, making for the most lovable Oscars music moment in years.
Beginning his act while seated in the audience, with a cowboy hat obscuring his impossibly angular features, Gosling was in character as the woebegone Ken, a macho hunk doomed to play beta in the toy netherworld of Barbie. He sang over the shoulder of his co-star Margot Robbie, who was not in character. She let out a genuine-seeming giggle, which set the tone for the number as much as the fuchsia lighting did. Barbie’s signature insight is that products and people, the worlds we escape to and the world we live in, exist not in opposition but in dialogue. So this was going to be a super-performative performance—but also one in which the fourth wall would be repeatedly broken. Gosling took off his hat, plopped it on the head of an audience member (his sister), and sauntered up to the stage.
From there, we got a classic movie-musical spectacle, populated entirely by men. Mark Ronson, the song’s co-producer, played bass guitar with his shirt billowing open, and Slash of Guns N’ Roses later appeared for a finale of shredding. On a pink bandstand, tuxedoed dancers wore pink sashes, and presented pink boards for Gosling to karate-chop. (This was all an homage to “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” except Marilyn Monroe’s version didn’t involve martial arts.) Barbie’s jokey take on the male ego has been much discussed, but Gosling’s mannerisms last night conveyed something more poignant than mere satire. He moved slumpily, less like a plastic doll than a rag doll. His Ken is not just a symbol onto which feminist ideas can be projected, but also a character struggling, in idiosyncratic ways, to figure out who he should be.
[Read: A very normal Academy Awards. Whew.]
The tempo changed, the set changed, and Gosling kept moving—shadowboxing, kissing the cameraperson’s hand, crowd-surfing amid a sea of Barbie-face cutouts. The energy built in a controlled frenzy, bolstered by the grinning participation of Barbie’s other Kens, including the actors Simu Liu and Kingsley Ben-Adir. Toward the end, in a warm emotional high point, Gosling offered the microphone to the women in the audience who made Barbie what it is: Robbie, America Ferrera, and the director Greta Gerwig. “I’m enough / And I’m great at doing stuff,” they sang together, a very ridiculous lyric that happened to feel, in that moment, absolutely accurate.