Ryan Gosling performing "I'm Just Ken" at the 96th Annual Oscars
Ryan Gosling didn't win an Academy Award last night. But Ryan Gosling totally won the Academy Awards last night.
[Scroll past the commentary for the full list of winners.]
When it was announced, several weeks ago, that the Barbie co-star would indeed be performing Best Original Song nominee “I'm Just Ken” at the 96th Annual Oscars, it was a mild surprise. Sure, Gosling owns that number. Yet he opted against singing La La Land's eventual winner “City of Stars” at the ceremony seven years ago, and there was some concern that Gosling might decline this live-crooning opportunity, too, perhaps feeling that his Mickey Mouse Club days were long behind him. And they are. Is it too much to hope, though, that a Guns N' Roses bio-pic might lie in Gosling's future? He's clearly already friendly with Slash!
Last night's “I'm Just Ken” began adorably, with Gosling starting his signature song from the audience and seated, to their evident delight, in front of Billie Eilish (whose own Barbie song would eventually win the Oscar) and behind Margot Robbie. Gosling began his rendition from beneath a cowboy hat, and when he removed it, he was sporting sunglasses – two Ken trademarks accounted for, and the number wasn't even five seconds old. Like most of the audience, Eilish and Robbie were laughing even before Gosling stood up, and while he didn't go shirtless in a full-length mink the way some of us may have hoped, his eye-searingly hot-pink ensemble with leather gloves to match was a more-than-acceptable substitute. Making his way on stage, he fist-bumped a couple musicians and one of the 10 Kens positioned on pink-upholstered steps, all of whom were dressed in black suits and, following their leader, black Stetsons. Their seated choreography and gestures were appropriately corny and melodramatic, and there was a terrific bit in which the dancers mimed smashing their prop champagne flutes on the floor so they could tear their hearts out with the broken glass. Then Gosling stood and walked toward the audience, his arms outstretched with “Worship me like the rock god I am” bravado. And then, just when you were thinking Gosling's number couldn't possibly get more wonderful, it did.
This thing had everything. Gosling's fellow movie Kens Simu Liu, Kingsley Ben-Air, Ncuti Gatwa, and Scott Evans posed and preened. Gosling himself air-surfed on dancers in a Busby Berkeley homage featuring spinning cardboard Barbie cutouts. Freaking Slash showed up, seemingly out of nowhere, and wailed on electric guitar. It should go without saying that the screaming, ecstatic crowd was long on its feet by this point, their overwhelming joy evident when Gosling jumped off the stage and recruited Robbie, Greta Gerwig, and America Ferrera to sing parts of the song's chorus into his handheld mic. (He also got La La Land co-star Emma Stone singing – a moment that Stone would reference later in the broadcast.) Heading back for the big finale, on the lyric “Put your manly hand in mine,” Gosling took the manly hand of one of the show's camerapeople, gave it a sweet kiss, and escorted the technician to the stage. And if there was anyone alive still unconvinced of Gosling's vocal prowess, when he hit his high note on “I-i-i-i-i-i-i'm ju-u-u-u-ust Ke-e-e-e-e-e-e-n!!!” he absolutely nailed it, ending the song with such an explosion of all-inclusive happiness that it's frankly astonishing that the Dolby Theatre still had its roof in place.
All it takes is one production number this extraordinary to turn a plasant Oscars telecast into one for the ages, and that's what Gosling and company gave us with “I'm Just Ken”; people will be talking about this live-television miracle for years. A good thing, too, because otherwise the 96th Academy Awards were perfectly respectable yet not exactly thrilling, which was almost bound to be the case in a night with so few genuine surprises among the winners.
As anticipated, Best Picture victor Oppenheimer cleaned up, if not quite as heartily as many predicted: seven awards in total, matching the tally of last year's Everything Everywhere All at Once but not equaling or exceeding the eight scored by Slumdog Millionaire in 2009, which was the last time a film scored that many. Also as expected, Oppenheimer's wins included Christopher Nolan's long-awaited Best Directing citation and acting prizes for Cillian Murphy and Robert Downey Jr. (Fun fact: With his victory, Murphy now becomes the fourth Dark Knight castmate – following Heath Ledger, Christian Bale, and Gary Oldman – to win an Oscar in the wake of that Nolan movie's release.) Season-long front-runner Da'Vine Joy Randolph picked up the Oscar she's had in the bag since at least December, and a bunch of other likelihoods, if not actual done deals, came to pass: the atomic-bomb drama for Cinematography, Film Editing, and Original Score; The Zone of Interest for International Feature Film; 20 Days in Mariupol for Best Documentary Feature; Billie Eilish and brother Finneas O'Connell for their Barbie anthem “What Was I Made For?” (You can imagine a number of voters wishing they could have a do-over following Gosling's number, but this deserved victory – the siblings' second Academy Awards in three years – makes 22-year-old Eilish the youngest person ever to have won an Oscar more than once.)
This isn't to say, however, that the evening was completely without unexpected turns, even if the ever-genial host Jimmy Kimmel delivered precisely what was expected of him and only rarely seemed truly on fire. (His late-in-the-telecast recitation of a certain ex-president's social-media post – and yup, that post was legit – was an impressively bitchy exception with a topnotch punchline: “Isn't it past your jail time?”) It was always a possibility, but you could tell that even Emma Stone herself was shocked to hear her name announced as Best Actress, and the somewhat hoarse star was obviously mortified that she would have to give a speech with a rip in the back of her gown – a wardrobe malfunction that she teasingly blamed on Gosling's performance earlier in the night.
In a slight surprise, The Boy & the Heron received Best Animated Feature over the more-widely favored Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse; it was a shame that Japanese legend Hayao Miyazaki wasn't in attendance to receive his second Oscar and inevitable standing ovation. In a major surprise, The Zone of Interest's eerie, largely subtle soundscape managed to sneak Best Sound away from Oppenheimer. Plus, although a few of us were hopeful enough to predict it, Godzilla Minus One's victory in Best Visual Effects was hardly a lock, this first-ever Godzilla nominee's budget of between 10 and 15 million a mere pittance compared to those of its four Hollywood competitors. It would've been nice if director and effects supervisor Takashi Yamakazi had been provided with a translator so he wouldn't have to struggle through an English-language speech, but his noble effort was still utterly charming, as was the fact that all four trophy recipients were carrying good-luck-charm Godzilla figurines. (My own luck was happily in force last night, as those Godzilla and Heron triumphs helped me tie my personal record of 18 correct guesses … though I'm still kicking myself for not going with War Is Over! Inspired by the Music of John & Yoko for Best Animated Short. I should've remembered that every Oscars ceremony boasts one winning movie, even if only an 11-minute one, that I absolutely can't stand.)
For much of the rest of the night, it was generally a tug-of-war between blandness and greatness, evidenced most plainly by the four Best Original Song nominees that weren't “I'm Just Ken”: the Jon Batiste and Becky G. performances may have been instantly forgettable, but the gorgeous Eilish/O'Connell number and spirited Osage drumming of “Wazhazhe (A Song for My People)” more than made up for them. Only one element of the ceremony was truly atrocious, and to the surprise of no one, it was the In Memoriam. No one could possibly fault the singing of Andrea and Matteo Bocelli. But between the heavily populated lyric-dance routine and telecast director Hamish Hamilton apparently not knowing where the hell to position his cameras, this segment was excruciating. We barely had time or proper focus to read the names of the departed, and a full 48 deceased film workers were grossly squished together into a rear-screen collage that was literally impossible to make out without freeze-framing the image, and maybe also owning a pair of binoculars. Just as I expect most commenters to be over-the-moon about “I'm Just Ken,” I'm thinking there'll be an outpouring of online loathing for this In Memoriam, because as moving as it was to see this near-annual disgrace open with a salute to Alexei Navalny, it hardly atoned for the collective shrug offered to the likes of Lance Reddick, Frances Sternhagen, Treat Williams, and Oscar-nominated actors Frederic Forrest and Burt Young.
Still, a 200-minute Oscars ceremony (that's 10 minutes shorter than Killers of a Flower Moon!) that only features one stupefyingly awful component is nothing to sniff at. And as easy as it would be to complain about the inane patter between certain presenters – I'm thinking especially of Melissa McCarthy and Octavia Spencer, Chris Hemsworth and Anya Taylor-Joy, and, most egregiously, Dwayne Johnson and Bad Bunny – I'm choosing to instead recall the ideal matches. Such as the Twins reunion of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito, who reminded the world, and a faux confrontational Michael Keaton, that they were both also big-screen Batman villains. Or Keaton himself and Catherine O'Hara, whose breezily funny repartee made me wish they would appear together in a forthcoming comedy. (As a friend at my viewing party reminded me, they're gonna: It's the Beetlejuice sequel arriving later this year.) Or Kate McKinnon and America Ferrera, who triumphed over initially lame material to score a big laugh with the help of deadpan master Steven Spielberg.
Yet can we agree that perhaps the most inspired presenter pairing – the introduction to a worthy celebration of stunt people – was the Barbenheimer match-up of Ryan Gosling (him again!) and Emily Blunt? No, I can't explain her dress straps, either, and their routine was definitely an undisguised plug for their impending rom-com The Fall Guy. Consider me wholly on-board for that movie, however, because Gosling and Blunt were a complete hoot last night, not so much throwing as heaving shade at one another's summertime smashes, with the former sniping about Oppenheimer riding Barbie's coattails and the latter parrying with references to “Ken-splaining” and Gosling "painting his abs on." I could've watched these two bicker all night long, but for two hours in May will work, too.
Even though I'm still bummed that Wes Anderson wasn't in the Dolby to receive his long-overdue first Oscar (for live-action short The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar), plenty of additional highs landed throughout the evening. The nominees in the four acting categories were introduced and saluted by previous winners in their categories, the most touching tributes including those given by Regina King to Danielle Brooks, by Lupita Nyong'o to Da'Vine Joy Randolph (Da'Vine was wearing her grandma's glasses in The Holdovers!), by Ben Kingsley to Cillian Murphy, and, loveliest of all, by Rita Moreno to America Ferrera. John Cena “honored” the notorious Oscars streaker of 50 years ago by presenting Best Costume Design in the nude – a potentially dismal routine that was way funnier than it should've been.
Kimmel took admirable time to reference last year's strikes and salute those on the picket lines. Impassioned, overtly political statements were made by Zone of Interest director Jonathan Glazer and 20 Days in Mariupol filmmaker/journalist Mstyslav Chernov, the latter of whom admitted that he'd gratefully trade his Oscar for peace in Ukraine. (In the most colossally tone-deaf moment of the evening, Chernov and his team were played off-stage with an instrumental rendition of “I'm Just Ken.” Ugh.) American Fiction's Cord Jefferson, in his Adapted Screenplay speech, suggested that instead of more movies budgeted at $200 million, Hollywood should perhaps consider making 20 movies budgeted at $10 million – a sentiment that scored a huge ovation from the crowd.
If pressed for my number-one favorite non-Ken moment from the 96th Oscars, though, I have two words for you: John Mulaney. Over the course of roughly 90 seconds while introducing the Best Sound category, the comedian delivered a brilliant slam at those who consider the silent era Hollywood's golden age (“These people are difficult and insane”), a priceless Madame Web take-down, and, in a tour de force of chatter, a full deconstruction of the movie he most hoped would win Best Picture this year: 1989's Field of Dreams. If “I'm Just Ken” was the grandest Oscars production number we'd been treated to in decades, this miniature standup set was potentially the funniest pre-envelope-opening banter, and with all deference to Jimmy, Mulaney made an unbeatable case for being asked to host this shindig next year. And, conceivably, for many, many years after.
2024 Academy Award winners:
Best Picture: Oppenheimer
Best Directing: Christopher Nolan, Oppenheimer
Best Actress: Emma Stone, Poor Things
Best Actor: Cillian Murphy, Oppenheimer
Best Supporting Actress: Da'Vine Joy Randolph, The Holdovers
Best Supporting Actor: Robert Downey Jr., Oppenheimer
Best Original Screenplay: Anatomy of a Fall, Justine Triet, Arthur Harari
Best Adapted Screenplay: American Fiction, Cord Jefferson
Best Original Song: “What Was I Made For?”, Barbie
Best Animated Feature: The Boy & the Heron
Best International Feature Film: The Zone of Interest, United Kingdom
Best Documentary Feature Film: 20 Days in Mariupol
Best Cinematography: Oppenheimer
Best Film Editing: Oppenheimer
Best Production Design: Poor Things
Best Costume Design: Poor Things
Best Sound: The Zone of Interest
Best Original Score: Oppenheimer
Best Visual Effects: Godzilla Minus One
Best Makeup & Hairstyling: Poor Things
Best Documentary Short Film: The Last Repair Shop
Best Live-Action Short Film: The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar
Best Animated Short Film: War Is Over! Inspired by the Music of John & Yoko
