Billie Eilish and the performance that moves everyone at the 2024 Oscars

The Oscars are also this thing here: amidst the pomp and glamor and the sense of officiality that permeates everything, Billie Eilish arrives on stage and whispers her voice. What Was I Made For? and everything stops. There is no need for virtuosity, no need for special effects: it was as if the Dolby Theater in Los Angeles all together held its breath for the duration of this heartfelt and minimalist performance. There are only Billie Eilish and brother Finneas O'Connell on piano. The moving platform and the pink background like Barbie: What Was I Made For? it is the song that closes the story of Barbie who goes into the real world and no longer knows what to do, no longer a doll but not yet a woman. “I once floated / Now I just fall / I once knew but now I'm not sure / What I was made for,” Billie Eilish whispers, over a melancholic chord progression. Barbie losing her innocence and wondering what she will have to do next. More than Barbie, the song is about Billie Eilish, as she herself said, who sings the mourning of a past and happier version of herself and feels uncertain about the future and the meaning of her life. With lines like «I was an ideal / I seemed so alive, but I'm not real / Just something you paid for» – it's easy to guess – Billie Eilish talks about Barbie who goes into the real world only in appearance: it's her, the popstar doll in which she transformed from a very young girl directing her words. Ariana Grande cried, the performance received a standing ovation. If Barbie lost the “important” nominations such as best director and best leading actress – she has already had a small revenge on the stage of the Dolby Theater.