Happy Kending: why righteous anger might be the role that wins Ryan Gosling an Oscar

Snubs are not exactly uncommon during awards season – not least because it’s the only time of year when anyone actually uses the word “snub” – but on Tuesday the Oscar nominations pulled off what can only be described as a turbosnub. By failing to recognise Greta Gerwig or Margot Robbie, the director and lead actress of Barbie, the Academy managed to create a historic firestorm. Social media is furious about the snubs, and everyone knows how hard it is to make social media angry.

Related: Oscars nominations 2024: Ryan Gosling ‘disappointed’ after Margot Robbie and Greta Gerwig snub

Luckily for us all, a white knight has come to save us all. Ryan Gosling, who did receive a nomination for his performance as Ken, released a statement that bristled with righteous fury at the snubs. “There is no Ken without Barbie, and there is no Barbie movie without Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie, the two people most responsible for this history-making, globally celebrated film,” he wrote. “No recognition would be possible for anyone on the film without their talent, grit and genius. To say that I’m disappointed that they are not nominated in their respective categories would be an understatement.”

While it’s fine to question the complete validity of his statement – the Oscars always nominates five people for best director and 10 movies for best picture, which makes this sort of snub statistically quite likely – you can’t argue with the fact that Gosling has his finger right on the pulse here. The world was lost and confused when Gerwig and Robbie weren’t nominated, but in one fell swoop Ryan Gosling was able to give voice to all the frustration.

It was a canny move because there is a universe in which Gosling’s nomination made him the villain of the story. As the meme shared by your more basic friends on Instagram yesterday explained, a man getting the credit for a woman’s work is sort of the entire point of Barbie, and so it wouldn’t be hard for public opinion to turn on him for precisely this reason. But by defending Gerwig and Robbie so trenchantly, that isn’t going to happen now.

It also marks another step in an awards season where he’s barely managed to put a foot wrong. During Jo Koy’s flaming crater of a jokeless and weirdly defensive Golden Globes monologue (during which he made a crack about Barbie’s “plastic boobies”), the defining reaction was Gosling’s. As the camera cut away to him, perhaps hoping for a smile, the world saw him scowling at Koy in exactly the same way that they were probably scowling at Koy. And when his song I’m Just Ken won a Critics’ Choice award, his reaction – best described as blankly stunned incomprehension – also managed to reflect the public mood.

If you’re looking for the exact opposite of this, of course, then seek out Oliver Stone’s recent criticism of Gosling. Earlier this week Stone said that Gosling was “wasting his time” by appearing in films such as Barbie, which he said “contribute to the infantilisation of Hollywood”. The backlash to his comments was so overwhelming that Stone was forced to tweet out a screengrabbed Notes app apology, in the traditional manner of the publicly shamed.

You could read Gosling’s Oscar statement as a reaction to this, too. Ever since Barbie was released, Gosling has been extremely all-in on the film, promoting it with such sincere fervour that you might have been forgiven for thinking that he single-handedly financed it. Ryan Gosling has always completely believed in Barbie, and his place within it, so his statement also works as a shot against any detractors who simply saw it as a heavily marketed bubblegum film based on an extremely popular toy IP.

As such, expect all eyes to be on Gosling when the Oscars roll around in March. He has so far demonstrated a perfect eye for the public mood, and as such has become the figure through whom we will experience the ceremony. There will be cutaways to him when Barbie wins anything, and even more pointed cutaways when it doesn’t. He still isn’t likely to win his award, because at this point Robert Downey Jr is such a lock that the other nominees don’t even need to show up. But that doesn’t matter, because Ryan Gosling is now more than that. He is the people’s best supporting actor nominee.

Also, it’s worth pointing out that America Ferrera was also nominated for Barbie, and she also voiced her scorn over the Gerwig and Robbie snubs. But everyone decided to focus on Ryan Gosling instead of her because, again, that’s sort of the point of Barbie.