When Jo Koy delivered his cringe-inducing monologue as the host of the Golden Globes on Sunday, it was arguably the most awkward moment of the entire evening. The half-laughs in the audience, the audible groans. Some people even covered their faces in an apparent effort to distance themselves. One of the most awkward jokes from Koy was his reductive, sexist assertion that Greta Gerwig’s Barbie was just a movie about “a plastic doll with big boobies.” While the director and writer was in the room, no less! How did she feel about his comment? In true Gerwig fashion, she responded to the joke with class, intelligence, and kindness, which is basically the best comeback of all.
Koy’s joke about Barbie was actually a one-two punch when it came to reducing the film that has inspired women all over the world to reconsider the way they look at feminism and self-worth and childhood. He decided to compare it to Oppenheimer, a male-dominated film directed by Christopher Nolan. “Oppenheimer is based on a 721 page Pulitzer Prize winning book about the Manhattan Project and Barbie is based on a plastic doll with big boobies,” the comedian said to uncomfortable seat shuffling and blank stares from the audience.
(I guess he forgot that people tried to pit the two films against each other from the beginning only for audiences to create “Barbenheimer,” the meme that assured us that we don’t have to choose between two very different films; we can enjoy them both.)
As for Gerwig, who co-wrote the script with husband Noah Baumbach and loved it so much that she asked to sign on as director, her response to this joke was an elegant shrug. When asked about the joke in an interview with Deadline, Gerwig responded, “Well, he’s not wrong. She’s the first doll that was mass produced with breasts, so he was right on. And you know, I think that so much of the project of the movie was unlikely because it is about a plastic doll… Barbie by her very construction has no character, no story, she’s there to be projected upon.” And with that sly little comment, that Barbie is there “to be projected upon,” Gerwig left Koy’s lame joke in the dust. (This is a cautionary tale, folks: don’t come for award-winning writers, because they’ll probably outwit you.)
Apart from that lame dig, Barbie had a great night at the Golden Globes. The film won the inaugural Cinematic and Box Office Achievement award at the Golden Globes, which Gerwig felt was “very fitting,” as she told Deadline. “For all of us, the thing that we wanted most of all was to connect with people and to have people share an experience in the cinemas, in the movie theatres. It felt like even though this is a brand new award, it felt like it was the award to honor that and that was always what we wanted to.”
Pretty impressive for a movie about “a plastic doll with big boobies.”
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