Three of the six nominees for Best Original Song at the 2024 Golden Globes came from Barbie — and director Greta Gerwig’s pink extravaganza prevailed.
Billie Eilish and her brother, Finneas, took home the trophy for Best Original Song for their wistful tune “What Was I Made For?” at the Sunday, January 7, awards show held at The Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills, California.
“I was not expecting this,” Eilish, 22, said while accepting her award. “Thank you to my brother, Finneas. You are the reason I am who I am. I wanna thank Greta and Noah [Baumbach] for making this incredible film. I wanna thank Margot [Robbie] for being Margot that we know and love.”
The other nominees included “Addicted to Romance” by Bruce Springsteen from She Came to Me, “Road to Freedom” by Lenny Kravitz from Rustin, “Peaches” by Jack Black, Aaron Horvath, Michael Jelenic, Eric Osmond and John Spiker from The Super Mario Bros. Movie and Barbie’s “Dance the Night” by Mark Ronson, Andrew Wyatt, Dua Lipa and Caroline Ailin and “I’m Just Ken” by Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt.
Eilish didn’t star in Barbie but said that cowriting “What Was I Made For?” with her brother, 26, pulled her out of a creative slump.
“Through this last winter, we’ve both been incredibly uninspired,” Eilish said during a June 2023 interview with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “And we’ve still been working and trying to make stuff. And honestly, that song was the first thing we’d written in a minute. Even though we were coming up with ideas and coming up with this and that, I remember after we wrote that first half, I go, ‘I think we still got it.’”
Eilish went on to explain that her writer’s block vanished after she started working on the tune, which is sung from Barbie’s perspective. “We were really in a zone of feeling like we lost it and feeling like, ‘Man, I don’t know if we can do this anymore,’” she recalled. “Barbie and Greta just pulled it out of me, I don’t know. Those first couple lyrics, ‘I used to float, now I just fall down,’ just came right out.”
Eilish’s fellow soundtrack collaborator Lipa, 28, had a similarly great experience working on Barbie. After the nominations were announced in December 2023, Lipa said she “couldn’t be more grateful” for her first Golden Globe nod. “Getting the chance to write a song for a movie was so special,” she said in a statement. “Figuring out how to soundtrack this critical moment in the movie on Barbie’s ‘best day ever’ was like this big jigsaw puzzle that Mark, Andrew, Caroline and I had to fit together. The entire experience was completely different than writing one of my own songs, and it’s one that I’ll never forget.”
Lipa also made a cameo appearance in the film as Mermaid Barbie alongside John Cena as Mermaid Ken.
