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Name: Ryan Gosling.
Age: 43.
Appearance: The delight of awards season.
Has Gosling won a lot of awards this year? No, none.
Well, that doesn’t sound very delightful. But he has been nominated for a lot of awards, thanks to his role as Ken in Barbie. And that means he has to show up to all the awards ceremonies.
Lucky him. The poor guy gets to spend a quarter of the year losing in public. No, it’s a good thing. An awards ceremony with Gosling in attendance is far better than an awards ceremony without Gosling in attendance.
How so? Because, unlike almost every other performer in Hollywood, Gosling exists as a magic bridge between the ceremony and the viewers at home.
Is that true? Yes. Did you see the Critics’ Choice awards on Sunday night?
Of course not. What happened? I’m Just Ken, the track Gosling sings towards the end of the Barbie film, won best song. And, while the rest of the cast and crew leapt to their feet to shower kisses on its songwriter, Mark Ronson, Gosling reacted like the rest of us.
Blank confusion? Yes, that’s right. He sat there, looking around with his eyebrows knotted, as if he was waiting for someone to announce that the whole thing was a prank. And lo, the meme that people will for ever tweet if they are baffled by something you said was born.
That is just one incident, though. That doesn’t make him the delight of awards season. He was also at the Golden Globes, where the host, Jo Koy, bombed harder than any other host in recent memory. During the nadir of his act, when he made a joke about Barbie’s “boobies”, the camera caught Gosling giving Koy a hard, unimpressed stare.
You know what this sounds like to me? That Gosling is the delight of awards season?
No, it sounds as if Gosling has figured out that the best way to survive awards season is to maintain an aura of detached yet amused inscrutability, because then the internet gets to project whatever inflated feeling it wants on to him and he goes viral every time. No, it’s definitely the delight thing.
Are you sure? Yes! Look at how he approached the Barbie press tour, with an immovable mask of fully committed irony. He invented the term “Kenergy”’ and called for funding to research what it is. Cillian Murphy didn’t really do that while promoting Oppenheimer.
Fine then, he is a delight. He is. He’s just Ken.
Do say: “Ryan Gosling is the best thing about awards season.”
Don’t say: “Shame he’ll lose the Oscar to Robert Downey Jr.”