The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced this week that Ryan Gosling will be performing “I’m Just Ken” at the 2024 Oscars next weekend after all. Billie Eilish and Finneas O’Connell will also perform their hit “Barbie” song, “What Was I Made For?,” both of which are up for best original song. Barbie was nominated in several categories, but critics point to the major snubs of the movie’s director, Greta Gerwig, and star, Margot Robbie, who were not nominated in their individual respective categories.
Caroline Smith is an associate professor of writing at the George Washington University. Her classes have focused on the topics of visual culture, women’s writing, and popular culture. Smith completed her dissertation project on chick lit which was later published as Cosmopolitan Culture and Consumerism in Chick Lit (2007) by Routledge Press. She has also published work on Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. Her research interests include women’s fiction and popular culture productions. Her current project, “Season to Taste: Rewriting Kitchen Space in Contemporary Women’s Food Memoirs,” examines the work of contemporary female food memoirists for the way in which these women construct their identities in relation to the kitchen. Additionally, she is co-editing an anthology about the contemporary heroine in popular culture.
Smith has explored feminism and heroine roles through different mediums, including literature, film and TV as well as the portrayal of female friendships, among other topics. In her classes, she has also explored the Oscars and how the Academy’s awards processes play out. She can discuss the significance of Gerwig’s and Robbie’s absence in their individual categories and other topics and themes portrayed in the history-making film.
If you would like to speak with Prof. Smith, please contact GW Senior Media Relations Specialist Cate Douglass at [email protected].
-GW-
