“Barbie” director Greta Gerwig isn’t letting Jo Koy’s Golden Globes jokes about the record-breaking film get to her.
During an interview with BBC Radio on Wednesday, she gave her stamp of approval to the comedian’s polarizing comparison of “Barbie” and Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer.”
“‘Oppenheimer’ is based on the 721-page Pulitzer Prize-winning book about the Manhattan Project — and ‘Barbie’ is about a plastic doll with big boobies,” he said during his opening monologue, rubbing some fans the wrong way.
“Well, he’s not wrong,” Gerwig, 40, bluntly stated.
“She’s the first doll that was mass-produced with breasts, so he was right on.”
She continued, “And you know, I think that so much of the project of the movie was unlikely because it is about a plastic doll.
“The insight that [Barbie’s creator] Ruth Handler had when she was watching her daughter play with baby dolls, is she realized, ‘My daughter doesn’t want to pretend to be a mother. She wants to pretend to be a grown woman.'”
Of course, she opposed the hundreds of fans who were disgusted by Koy’s “Barbie” jabs.
Viewers rushed to social media to express their dismay with his comments during the Golden Globes, labeling them as sexist and claiming they proved the entire point of the “Barbie” movie, which was to highlight women’s struggles in a male-dominated world.
“Saying ‘Oppenheimer’ was based on a great work and dismissing Barbie as a movie based on a doll with big boobs was so aggressively misogynistic in the face of all that Greta Gerwig and Margo Robbie accomplished it just turned me against Jo Koy the rest of the show,” one X user penned after hearing 52-year-old Koy’s opening monologue.
Sharing a similar sentiment, another wrote, “Jo Koy reducing the Barbie movie to a movie about ‘big boobs’ when the entire plot of Barbie is how difficult it is to be a woman in a men’s (sic) world.”
“Jo Koy, who I have fortunately never heard of until today, making a sexist joke about the Barbie movie a the Golden Globes highlights exactly why the movie was made,” a third disappointed fan slammed.
“Men that exist solely to tear down the accomplishments of women, shift focus to their looks, and sexualize it in the process do not deserve to have a platform like the one he had last night.”
While “Oppenheimer” took home several awards from the ceremony, “Barbie” became the first project to win the Golden Globe for cinematic and box office achievement — even beating out Taylor Swift’s “Eras Tour” film.
Gerwig reflected on the moment she got to take the stage with the cast of “Barbie” as a “wonderful and emotional” experience.
“To be able to take the stage with the group that made it … felt very fitting because I think for all of us the thing that we wanted most of all was to connect with people and have people share an experience in the cinemas, in the movie theaters,” she shared.
“Even though this was a brand new award, it felt like it was the award to honor that and that was always what we had wanted to do. It was very full circle.”
