Dammit, Ryan Gosling Is Too Handsome And Talented To Also Be Such A Charming Lil Goofball

I’ll tell you what the problem is…

Ryan Gosling is quite simply too talented and handsome to also be such a charming lil goofball. That’s too many things. You should only be allowed to be two of those things at once. Like, if you want to be charming and talented, that’s fine, but you can’t look like a chiseled god. Or if you want to be beautiful and talented, that’s also fine, but you should have the personality of a dishrag. And you can be a handsome goof, too, but then you can’t be generationally good at your profession or hobby, which will be fine because you can skate by pretty well in life on those other two things anyway. But you can’t be all three. That’s not fair.

It’s a problem that’s been brewing for a long time, too, this Gosling business. You’ve seen him on SNL and as a guest on talk shows. And you (hopefully) saw him in The Nice Guys, a wonderful little action-comedy where he and Russell Crowe got to be silly detectives in the 1970s for a few hours. That was the thing that started teetering me over the edge. He was so good in that. The guy from The Notebook. It was somehow both delightful and upsetting. And petty of me. Which was also upsetting. This was becoming a real problem.

All of which brings us to the 2024 Oscars, where he showed up looking like he stepped out of a cologne commercial and was nominated for Best Supporting Actor for his role as Ken in Barbie and then proceeded to put on probably the greatest musical performance the show has seen in its almost century of existence.

Dammit.

Goddammit.

Ryan.

Look how fully he commits straight through. Look at Margot Robbie giggling and him punching pink boards and basically doing “What if ‘Material Girl’ by Madonna but self-aware dudes?” That shouldn’t work. It shouldn’t! Imagine explaining any of it to a version of yourself from like two years ago. “So, yeah, there’s gonna be a movie about Barbie that gets nominated for a bunch of Oscars and then at the ceremony Ryan Gosling will show up in a pink suit and perform a song in character as Ken and the whole thing will blow the roof off the place.” That should’ve been weird. And maybe corny. But definitely not the highlight of the entire night. You would be so confused. It might actually all somehow be more confusing to the old version of you than the thing where you time-traveled from the future just to share this information.

Look how happy it made Martin Scorsese.

I mean, honestly.

Ryan.

Let everyone else have, like, one thing.

This is getting ridiculous.

I mean, I guess he didn’t actually win the Oscar he was nominated for. Robert Downey, Jr. won that one.

Which helps.

A little.

Even though I did want him to win it.

It’s very conflicting.

But still.

He really is such a goofball, though. I’m trying to write this article and be pretend mad about it all but I just stopped to watch the performance again and I can’t stop giggling. It’s crazy. The man is a heartthrob and a star and just a silly goose. He had dinner with Sylvester Stallone a while back and straight-up would not stop talking about Rambo. We know this because Stallone talked about it on television. Here, look.

“He goes, ‘I was fascinated by Rambo and I used to go to school dressed as Rambo and people would chase me away and I still didn’t stop,’ vacation as Rambo, he just kept saying that he had a lot of affiliation with Rambo,” Stallone recalled. “And I thought, you know, this is interesting. If I ever pass the baton, I’ll pass it on to him because he loves the character.”

When pressed about Gosling taking over the role, Stallone replied, “I would say yes but I don’t know if anyone would say, ‘Hey, he’s too good-looking to be Rambo.’”

Madness.

But also…

Now I really want to see Ryan Gosling play Rambo. Think about the range here. Think about singing a musical number at the Oscars in a pink suit and then also playing Rambo. That shouldn’t work, either! I should be rolling my eyes right now! But instead I want it!

Dammit.

Goddammit.

Goddammit, Ryan Gosling.

I need to see footage of you being bad at something. I don’t care what. Duck-hook a four-iron into the woods. Go fail the bar exam. Something. Anything.

But then please make a Nice Guys sequel.

But also knock it off.

Please.

Thank you.

RYAN.