IT takes a lot to make me laugh out loud.
Madonna’s Instagram feed does, regularly provoking in me uncontrollable guffaws of incredulous hilarity that any pensioner would behave in such a toe-curling, cringe-worthy “down wiv tha kids” manner.
I also find myself cracking up whenever I hear Prince Harry whine about press intrusion given how voraciously he invades his own family’s privacy for Grand Canyon-sized pieces of silver.
And watching President “one foot in the grave” Biden try to negotiate the steps of Air Force One on a windy day can dissolve me into fits of giggles.
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But I don’t think anything has ever made me explode into a more prolonged cacophony of choking hysteria than the news that Barbie’s been snubbed by the Oscars – but Ken hasn’t.
My amusement was intensified by the predictable howls of rage that spontaneously erupted from indignant feminists all over the world, and from those weirdly weak little men who love to virtue-signal their feminist credentials even if it involves mocking men and blaming them for all society’s ills.
Apparently, the failure of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to nominate Barbie star Margot Robbie for Best Actress and Greta Gerwig for Best Director, whilst simultaneously nominating Ryan “Ken” Gosling for Best Supporting Actor, is on the same level of historical global tragedy as the Black Death.
And the common theme to the social media fury was that this decision “completely proves the f*cking point of the movie!”
In other words, by not nominating the two key women behind the movie’s success, but nominating the man instead, the Academy has proved itself to be a huge, stinking pile of misogynistic manure fuelled by a craven love of the dreaded “Patriarchy”.
Even Gosling himself joined in the horrified response, issuing a witheringly critical statement saying how disappointed he is that Robbie and Gerwig have been snubbed.
Of course, he could have made a much bigger statement of solidarity to his fallen colleagues by saying he wasn’t going to accept his nomination and wouldn’t be attending the Oscars.
Ken definitely would have done that because the spineless twerp would have been too terrified of Barbie’s vengeful wrath not to!
But Ryan’s made of tougher stuff and his outrage for his female co-stars doesn’t quite extend to giving up his own chance of winning an Oscar.
And nor should it.
Because the truth is he gave by far the best acting performance in that otherwise utterly atrocious film.
Oh, I know, I know, it grossed $1 billion at the box office so must automatically be one of the best movies ever made – right?
Wrong.
Some of the worst movies ever made grossed $1 billion – including unwatchable tosh like Transformers: Age Of Extinction, to Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, and three of the execrable Jurassic World septet of celluloid calamities.
As I wrote at the time it came out, Barbie is a truly dreadful piece of misandrist propaganda that constantly bangs on about the “patriarchy”, paints men as evil oppressors, women as unimpeachably perfect victims, and anyone who dares challenge this absurdly biased notion as a disgusting misogynist.
It’s also predicated on a factual lie: that Mattel, the real-life firm that created Barbie, has always been run by a bunch of Alpha males in an all-male boardroom.
In fact, it was run for 30 years by a very smart businesswoman named Ruth Handler, and the current Mattel 12-person board includes five women.
But feelings matter more than facts to the woke world, so Barbie is presented as the brilliant, beautiful embodiment of female empowerment who doesn’t need dumb men like Ken to get on in life.
And Ken is reduced to a pitifully emasculated goon, crooning a soppy lament to his own “blond fragility”.
The film’s woeful impact was encapsulated in a tweet by singer Lily Allen who declared: “I saw Barbie and Oppenheimer this weekend and my takeaway is that if Oppenheimer was a woman, Hiroshima might not have happened.”
Yeah, because women always make such wonderful peace-loving leaders as our first real Queen, Mary I, showed when she burned hundreds of protestants at the stake earning herself the moniker “Bloody Mary”.
In fact, according to the National Bureau of Economics, between 1480 and 1913, Europe’s queens were 27% more likely than its kings to wage war.
So, Barbie’s a monstrously disingenuous movie, and although I think Margot Robbie and Greta Gerwig are both very talented, I don’t think either deserved to be Oscar-nominated simply as a reward for conspiring to make such man-bashing claptrap.
The cold, hard reality is that all the other actresses nominated for Best Actress, including Emma Stone and Carey Mulligan, gave better performances, and all the other directors nominated for Best Director, including Justine Triet for the brilliant Anatomy Of A Fall, made better movies.
And the fact that Ryan Gosling has been nominated for playing Ken is a gloriously fitting display of karma that can only possibly be improved upon if he wins on the night, looks down at Robbie staring up at him glumly from the front row, quotes the line from the narrator in the film saying “Barbie has a great day every day, but Ken only has a great day if Barbie looks at him,” winks smugly and shouts: “Last laugh to the Patriarchy!”
