Who won pop culture in 2023? It was so nearly Taylor Swift – but she was pipped at the post

Who won pop culture in 2023? We have a few sentimental favourites. James Martin, the Belfast actor with Down syndrome, lauded by the glitterati when An Irish Goodbye, in which he starred, won best live-action short at the Oscars, is certainly a contender for that special jury prize. Ryan Tubridy’s appearance at the Oireachtas hearings wasn’t exactly a win, but it caused the public to huddle around their televisions as Americans did during the Cuban Missile Crisis. That’s something.

Does Prince Harry count as a pop-cultural figure? Hard to say. I can’t be bothered to look it up, but his memoir, published nearly a year ago, sold more copies than any book since A Tale of Two Cities (or something). He ended the year by winning a court case and turning Piers Morgan puce. So he is certainly on the up. U2 earned a squillion dollars for performing a 30-year-old album in a giant digital snow globe. Gwyneth Paltrow thrilled the world – easily distracted bits of it, anyway – with what tabloids are calling the “ski-crash trial”. Time is said to fly, but that saga already feels as if it happened in another century.

The boring answer is Taylor Swift. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Critics love to accuse musicians of “recycling” their music, but Swift, eager to regain ownership, really has sold shedloads – and won consistently good reviews – by re-recording her back catalogue. Quite a wheeze. This year we got “Taylor’s version” of her 2014 album 1989 (if you follow). Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour became the highest-grossing concert film ever. She was Time magazine’s person of the year. Just last week her home state of Pennsylvania officially declared 2023 the “Taylor Swift Era”. Who are we to argue with the House of Representatives in the Keystone State? Let’s just sling her the gong now and wrap the column up early.

This feels a little like just another year in a continuing dynasty. Swift conquered the world close to a decade ago and has, ever since, been merely consolidating her domination. If we were to compare Swift to Napoleon – for the year that’s in it – she is not yet advancing foolishly on Moscow, but Austerlitz and Jena are surely in the past.

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Speaking of battles, the person who truly won pop culture in 2023 did so following a savage conflagration at the centre of the year. In the end it was not, to quote Wellington on Waterloo, “the nearest-run thing you ever saw”. She did not require the assistance of Blücher’s Prussians on the right flank. It was a noisy fight, but there was always going to be one winner.

We are talking, of course, about Greta Gerwig and the phenomenon that was Barbie. It is worth recalling how the world greeted the news that the American film-maker, Oscar-nominated for Little Women and Lady Bird, had elected to make a film based around a 12in plastic fashion doll. It is no exaggeration to say there was a sense of betrayal. How could a creative mind enslave itself to the corporate behemoth that was Mattel?

It soon became clear that, writing with her romantic partner, Noah Baumbach, Gerwig had something more ambitious planned than an extended commercial. A burbling cult was already forming before, following delays in the release of Coyote vs Acme, Warner Bros announced the film would be released on the same day as Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. Nobody could then have predicted how the Barbenheimer portmanteau would boss the internet. The industry is now controlled by forces beyond the ken of traditional marketing wonks. It’s a type of voodoo.

There is no better place to consider the subsequent success than Ireland. It is easy to be snitty about the title of highest-grossing film of all time but, whatever about inflation, only a tiny handful of films have been in that position. When, more than 13 years after the release of Avatar, Barbie passed out that space opera to take the Irish title it said something about her film (plays well on repeat viewings?) and something about Irish cinemagoing demographics (skews female?). It ended its run as the 14th-highest-grossing movie ever at the world box office. It is about to get a hatful of Oscar nominations.

All of this is a remarkable achievement for a director who, though much admired, was not seen as being in the blockbuster business. It is a remarkable achievement in an age when cinema was supposed to be retreating back to the small screen. Gerwig’s achievements have made her one of the most powerful people in the business. Netflix has hired her to readapt CS Lewis’s Narnia sequence. The Cannes film festival has appointed her head of the 2024 jury. And we present her with this imaginary award.