Greta Gerwig’s Response to Jo Koy’s ‘Barbie’ Joke Misfire Might Not Be What You’d Expect
The 2024 Golden Globe Awards was certainly a show for the books, boasting a surplus of winners and losers. Indeed, the most recent ceremony saw Barbie win the brand new award for Cinematic & Box Office Achievement, while Jo Koy’s hosting efforts were panned by just about everyone.
One of his many attempts to tread water led him to draw a comparison between Barbie and its perennial rival Oppenheimer, noting how the latter is “based on a 721-page Pulitzer Prize-winning book about the Manhattan Project, and Barbie is on a plastic doll with big boobies.”
There was nary a giggle to be heard at the time, but in a recent interview with BBC Radio 4’s Today (as reported by Entertainment Weekly), Barbie mastermind Greta Gerwig has now offered her opinion on Koy’s joke—an opinion chock-full of grace with a smattering of insight into Gerwig’s creativity:
“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.”
The projections made by Gerwig and co-writer/husband Noah Baumbach speak for themselves, of course, with Barbie‘s screenplay proving itself an incisive catalyst for the deconstruction of sexism, feminism, and the systems that they’re both navigating at any given time. Now all we need is for Barbie to come full circle and project back onto the rest of the world.
Further, Gerwig’s candid revelations only further expose the injustice that is the Academy classifying Barbie as an Adapted Screenplay rather than an Original for the Oscars. Indeed, in many ways, Barbie‘s screenplay could never have been anything but original, which, in hindsight, probably had a hand in making the studio executives tremble in their boots at the outset.
Barbie is now available to stream on Max.
(featured image: Warner Bros. Pictures)
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