I’m just Ken

Brian McLoughlin

I’m just Ken stole the Oscar show. What do you do when the party’s sagging? Get 65 Kens, led by Ryan Gosling – pristine in perusing pink – to sing and dance and get the loudest cheer. But they didn’t give I’m just Ken the Oscar for Best Song – such ingratitude! Imagine if I’m just Ken were the only Oscar the film Barbie won, the Ken doll getting the Oscar, not the Barbie doll. Would that be ironic or anti-feminist? I don’t know; I’m just Ken.

Speaking of irony, the Oscar for Best Costume was presented by a naked man… a John… barely covered by an envelope, reprising the streaker appearing on stage at the 1974 Oscars. And Barbie lost Best Costume to Poor Things; methinks the reason is that Bella in Poor Things wore a costume that Barbie in Barbie didn’t wear, the same costume that John wore. That’s my take, but I don’t know; I’m just Ken.

The Barbenheimer box-office statistic: Barbie $1.5 billion, Oppenheimer $1 billion. I didn’t expect the Academy of Motion Pictures, who award the Oscars and who are mostly men, to give Barbie more Oscars than Oppenheimer, but I wanted Barbie to win Best Picture, to express the new hope that a doll is preferable to a bomb.

Oppenheimer was the biggest Best Picture favourite since La-La Land in 2017, and La-La land lost – to Moonlight. Moonlight, a story of a gay boy in an impoverished drug culture, with an all black cast, defeated La-Land, an extravagant white Hollywood musical, starring those Hollywood darlings and show stealers, Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone.

Moonlight’s victory in the throes of Me-too and Oscar-so-white heightened the recognition that great filmmaking is not the sole preserve of white men. Subsequently, films by people of black skin, Mexicans, Argentines, Koreans, and Chinese won Oscars, as the Academy became increasingly diverse. Also women: whereas in the first 92 Oscar years only one woman won Best Director, two out of the last four Best Director winners were women. This is good I say, but I don’t know, I’m just Ken.

Oppenheimer, the film is not diverse; it’s racist – telling the story of JD Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, the single most destructive act in history that killed tens of thousands of citizens of the Japanese race – the film: an essentially all-white male assembly. Surely the diversity enveloping the Academy wouldn’t give this Best Picture.

It looked promising early on. Two Japanese films won Oscars – perhaps the Academy’s apology for the bomb, ‘War is over…’ won best short animated film, a documentary on the horror of war in Ukraine won Best Documentary. And when Barbie lost the cosmetic awards to Poor Things, my hope switched to Poor Things, which is partly Irish, produced by Element Pictures, Dublin. And when Emma Stone as Bella won Best Actress, hope swelled up in me.

Only Best Picture left… surely Poor Things would… but what an anticlimax: Oppenheimer won Best Picture.

The bomb beat the beautiful. Sure, Cillian killed it – Best Actor – but my heart bleeds for the poor things that suffer and die in war. Thus I’m convinced Oppenheimer is the destructive choice, Poor Things would be the creative one – Poor Things an immensely creative satire on the absurdity of men striving to possess a beautiful woman that surely has a meta context. Methinks the Academy got it wrong; methinks the Oscars failed peace, but what would I know; I’m just Ken.

Brian McLoughlin is a member of Inklings Writing Group, who meets on Tuesdays at 11am in the Annebrook House Hotel.