It’s fair to say that Jo Koy’s hosting debut at this year’s Golden Globes wasn’t to everyone’s tastes.
The US comedian opened the show with a monologue that received a lukewarm response among both viewers and the stars in attendance, while a joke about Taylor Swift later in the ceremony also fell flat.
One joke that proved divisive on social media was when he commented that Oppenheimer was “based on a 721-page Pulitzer Prize-winning book about the Manhattan Project,” while “Barbie is [based] on a plastic doll with big boobies”.
Speaking to Deadline, the movie’s director Greta Gerwig had a rather surprising reaction to Jo’s remarks.
“Well, he’s not wrong,” she observed. “She’s the first doll that was mass produced with breasts, so he was right on.”
Greta continued: “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 insight that [Barbie creator] Ruth Handler had when she was watching her daughter play with baby dolls, is she realised, ‘My daughter doesn’t want to pretend to be a mother. She wants to pretend to be a grown woman’.
“Barbie has been around since 1959… she’s been a villain and she’s been a hero, but it felt like in a way even though it’s so seemingly superficial that it was such a rich place to start.”
Going into this year’s Golden Globes, Barbie was the most-nominated film of the year, eventually picking up two of the nine awards it was up for.
Meanwhile, it was Barbie’s box office “rival” Oppenheimer that proved to be the runaway success of the night, scooping five awards in total.