The 2024 Oscars have come and gone, and we have a winner for “thing nobody will stop talking about.” No, it won’t be host Jimmy Kimmel calling out his “review” from the orange clown with 91 indictments. It won’t even be…whatever dark magic somehow caused Al Pacino’s presentation of the “Best Picture” award to be so…anticlimactic. And thankfully, the brain bleach is already starting to work on WTFever the naked John Cena bit was. Nope, we won’t be looking back on this year’s ceremony in frustration or with a lingering sense of awkwardness. Instead, we’ll all be reliving that incredible performance of “I’m Just Ken.” Why? Because it was fun, and we can all definitely use a little — a lot — of fun right now.
Everyone is (rightly) praising Ryan Gosling for putting on a show to remember in his sparkly pink getup. However, let’s not forget he wasn’t up on that stage all by himself. It’s a pretty big deal, in a society that seems to think men who dance are somehow lesser, to have that many men — that many Kens, if you will — putting on the song and dance number of the night. Zoom out from the absolutely glorious visual that is Gosling’s…everything during that performance, really, and you’ve got everyone from the Fifteenth Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa), to Shang-Chi (Simu Liu), and so many more stars. Which, ok. If you’ve seen the Barbie movie, you know there are a bazillion Kens. And if you search for them in the crowd during the 2024 Oscars performance, you’ll probably catch most, if not all, of them.
But it takes a whole lot of searching. Because one thing even the most skilled folks in Hollywood are going to do is take a massive song and dance number…and cut out most of the dance. Annoying AF, at best? Absolutely. And yet, even in spite of that, “I’m Just Ken” at the 2024 Oscars was still everything. (Getting a dancer to forgive that is a feat in and of itself — just saying.) And it had everything — from a meme-worthy moment at the beginning with Gosling just…manifesting behind Barbie costar Margot Robbie, to a cameo from Slash. From a tribute to “Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend,” to a quick reunion between Gosling and La La Land costar Emma Stone (who happened to also be one of this year’s Oscar winners).
We’ll be dissecting this one — and demanding details on the choreographer and any backup dancers who weren’t well-known Kens, actually — for a while. The artistic vision, the brilliance, the costuming, the lighting, the performance! So here for it. Forever and always. Imagine if Hollywood gave us this kind of creativity and — better yet — celebrated it more often. Now, that’s the dream.
