Dear Gossips,

The BET Awards were last night and Beyoncé and SZA were the big winners winning three awards each, including tying for Album of the Year. Both Beyoncé and SZA are on tour in Europe and did not attend the event. But Ice Spice was there and even though she was nominated multiple times without a win, as we’ve been saying for months now, this entire year has been a win for Ice and it was another big weekend because… “Barbie World”. She’s on the Barbie soundtrack.

Ice Spice’s latest collaboration with Nicki Minaj sampling Aqua’s infamous song by a similar name dropped on Friday with the pinkest most perfect Barbie video that serves all the looks and the product placement, LOL.

That is a LOT of Chanel. Which, ahem, looks better on these two Barbies than on the Margot Robbie Barbie. But it’s as big of a boost for Ice Spice’s profile as it is for the movie. Because Nicki and Ice Spice together, for Barbie, make all the sense. And it’s the latest in the Barbie movie’s excellent marketing offensive. Fresh off the Barbie Dreamhouse Architectural Digest tour last week, we’re seeing the world of Barbie again through the eyes of the artist most closely associated with Barbie and the hottest new talent in the game coming together on a track that will be contending for Song of the Summer, just as Barbie goes for the title at the box office.

Barbie opens on July 21, the same day as Oppenheimer. The industry has had this date marked on the calendar for a while now because it’s basically a cage match at the cineplex. This is Christopher Nolan’s movie about the atomic bomb and we’ve heard all about Nolan’s attention to detail – how he managed to film without using CGI, how he and his team painstakingly recreated the sets, and cast real scientists, how the studio has booked out all the IMAX theatres so that audiences can fully appreciate the sophistication in filmmaking.

This a film marketed towards older men, a movie for dads, and it’s up against … Barbie. Greta Gerwig’s Barbie. Which, by the way, isn’t exactly amateur hour where cinematography is concerned. As Sarah wrote last month when the full trailer for Barbie was released, cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto “developed a unique color palette called “Techni-Barbie” for the film and the set designs for Barbie, by Sarah Greenwood, are a “deliberate callback to the era of Technicolor musicals”. So there’s a LOT of sophistication in filmmaking in the Barbie movie too, not to mention the fact that Greta Gerwig directed and co-wrote the script with Noah Baumbach and they bring their own fair share of Oscar nominations to match Christopher Nolan’s.

Just because one movie is about the Very Serious Topic of Nuclear Weapons and the other is about the Very Fun Topic of a Doll’s Existential Crisis, it doesn’t mean one has more value over the other. Oppenheimer and Barbie won’t just be clashing at the box office, they could actually be going head-to-head at the Oscars. And if that actually happens…

Will Ice Spice go to the Oscars? She’s part of the Barbie team now. And it’s very possible that one of the songs from the Barbie soundtrack will be nominated for Best Original Song. I’m not entirely sure right now about the eligibility for Ice and Nicki’s “Barbie World” considering the Aqua sample, and of course we’ll have to see where all the songs are placed in the film and how they work with each scene (Dua Lipa’s contribution to the movie “Dance the Night” could also be a strong contender) but wouldn’t it be a sight to see that night? Ice Spice and Nicki up on that stage twerking to the lyrics:

“And I’m bad like the Barbie
I’m a doll, but I still wanna party
Pink ’vette like I’m ready to bend
I’m a ten, so I pull in a Ken”

And these lyrics especially crack me up the most in Ice Spice’s verse:

“She a Barbie bitch with her Barbie clique
I keep draggin’ her, so she bald a bit”

It’s funny… but it’s also true! We all dragged our Barbies around and pulled out the hair!

Yours in gossip,

Lainey

Nicki Minaj Gossip

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