By Lindsey Bahr
The Oscars just got an infusion of Kenergy.
Ryan Gosling will sing the pop power ballad " I'm Just Ken " at the show on March 10, the show's producers announced Wednesday. Others set to perform their nominated original songs include Billie Eilish and Finneas O'Connell, Jon Batiste, Scott George and the Osage Singers and Becky G.
Gosling is also nominated for best supporting actor that evening. While in character as Ken in a promo for the show with Jimmy Kimmel, he shrugged that he's not going to win. In fairness, even if it was a joke, he might not be wrong: His fellow nominee Robert Downey Jr. has been sweeping the season.
"I'm Just Ken," written by Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt, still has a chance, however, even if the other "Barbie" song, Eilish and Finneas's soulful "What Was I Made For" seems to be the clear awards favorite to date, having already won a Grammy. But the Ken ballad is also the one everyone has wanted to see on the Oscars telecast, which will mark Gosling's first time performing at the show.
As Ken might shout, hiding behind a corner that he believes is somehow soundproof: "Sublime!"
The other nominated songs include Diane Warren's "The Fire Inside," from "Flamin' Hot," Jon Batiste and Dan Wilson's "It Never Went Away" from "American Symphony," and Scott George's "Wahzhazhe" from "Killers of the Flower Moon."
The 96th Oscars will be broadcast live on ABC and in more than 200 territories worldwide from the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles on Sunday, March 10 with the show beginning at 7 p.m. EDT.
Lindsey Bahr is an AP film writer
More than 67 million people watched Donald Trump and Kamala Harris debate. That’s way up from June
An estimated 67.1 million people watched the presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, a sharp increase from the June debate that eventually led to President Joe Biden dropping out of the race.
The debate was run by ABC News but shown on 17 different networks, the Nielsen company said. The Trump-Biden debate in June was seen by 51.3 million people.
Tuesday's count was short of the record viewership for a presidential debate, when 84 million people saw Trump's and Hillary Clinton's first faceoff in 2016. The first debate between Biden and Trump in 2020 reached 73.1 million people.
With Harris widely perceived to have outperformed Trump on Tuesday night, the former president and his supporters are sharply criticizing ABC moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis. The journalists waded into on-the-fly fact checks during the debate, correcting four statements by Trump.
No other debates are currently scheduled between the two presidential candidates, although there's been some talk about it and Fox News Channel has publicly offered alternatives. CBS will host a vice presidential debate between Tim Walz and JD Vance.
Tuesday's debate stakes were high to begin with, not only because of the impending election itself but because the last presidential debate uncorked a series of events that ended several weeks later with Biden's withdrawal from the race after his performance was widely panned.
Opinions on how ABC handled the latest debate Tuesday were, in a large sense, a Rorschach test on how supporters of both sides felt about how it went. MSNBC commentator Chris Hayes sent a message on X that the ABC moderators were doing an "excellent" job — only to be answered by conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, who said,... Read More