Two weeks ago at karaoke, a man in a denim jacket sang I'm Just Ken with his eyes closed and his whole chest, and the sticky-floored bar in Southeast Portland sang the back half with him. The host, who calls everyone baby, said baby, that is the song of the year. She was not wrong. Nobody in that room needed a critic to tell them what had landed.
This morning the Oscar nominations came out. Barbie got eight of them. Greta Gerwig is not up for Director and Margot Robbie is not up for Actress, which means the film was nominated for nearly everything except the two jobs most responsible for it existing in the shape it took.
I am not going to litigate the ballot. I want to talk about the pattern underneath it, because it is the same pattern that governs my industry.
Institutions built to reward craft are structurally uncomfortable rewarding work that was also spectacularly good at selling something.
Barbie was, among other things, an enormous commercial act. A toy brand, a marketing campaign that turned a color into a shortage, a film that made a billion dollars while being genuinely strange about mortality and womanhood in the third act. That combination is the hardest thing to do in any creative field, and it is the thing prestige juries trust least. Commercial fluency reads to a jury as luck, or as the product of a machine, rather than as a decision somebody made a thousand times in a row.
I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms. The campaign that moves units gets a line in the quarterly review. The campaign that wins the metal is the beautiful one that ran twice in a market of four million people. We all know which of the two paid for the office, and we all know which one goes on the wall.
Commercial fluency reads to a jury as luck, or as the product of a machine, rather than as a decision somebody made a thousand times in a row.
The practical lesson for anyone doing this work: do not build your sense of whether the work is good around who hands out the award. Build it around whether the thing did what you designed it to do, for the people you designed it for, in the numbers you predicted. Awards are a lagging, political, and frequently uninformed indicator. Ken being sung by strangers in a bar in January is a leading one.
Truffles and Barnaby remain entirely unmoved by the Academy, by Mattel, and by me at seven in the morning reading a list of names out loud to nobody. Breakfast was late. That was the only snub they registered.