Aurelia Butler

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    Jason Aldean’s ‘Try That in a Small Town’ Hits No. 1

    The country star’s song, now a culture war battleground, is his first all-genre chart topper. The K-pop group NewJeans’ new album edged out the “Barbie” soundtrack on the Billboard 200.Last week, Jason Aldean’s song “Try That in a Small Town,” which the country star portrays as a paean to neighborly values but critics have described as a call to racist vigilantism, opened at No. 2 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart, after its music video became a culture war battleground.Now the song has ascended to the peak, becoming the first No. 1 single on Billboard’s all-genre singles chart in Aldean’s nearly two-decade career as a top Nashville hitmaker.Just two weeks ago, before the controversy began, the song was posting minimal numbers. But in its most recent week out, it garnered 31 million streams, sold 175,000 copies and reached a radio audience of nine million people in the United States, according to the tracking service Luminate.As the song has stirred debate, tweaks have been made to its music video, which early on was pulled without explanation by Country Music Television but remains available on YouTube. Last week, a new version appeared, six seconds shorter than the original and scrubbed of news clips showing Black Lives Matter protests in 2020.Aldean has denied that “Try That” is “a pro-lynching song,” or that race plays any part in the song’s lyrics. “These references are not only meritless, but dangerous,” he wrote on social media.On the album chart, the K-pop group NewJeans beat the “Barbie” soundtrack in a photo finish.“Get Up,” a six-track EP by NewJeans, a quintet that is part of the newest wave of K-pop acts, opens at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 with the equivalent of 126,500 sales in the United States, according to Luminate. “Barbie: The Album,” featuring Lizzo, Dua Lipa, Sam Smith, Billie Eilish and other artists, was credited with 126,000. (The service’s publicly reported figures are rounded.)The results were delayed by several days, with Billboard saying only that there was a “processing issue” in combing through the data.The breakdown of the two albums’ “equivalent” numbers — which are determined by comparing sales, streams and track downloads — illustrates the various ways music is consumed these days, and how different formats can affect the charts.“Get Up,” like many K-pop releases, came out in a variety of collectible CD packages. Of its 126,500 equivalents, 101,000 copies were sold as complete albums, with 99 percent of that on CD, according to Billboard; songs from it were also streamed 34 million times.“Barbie: The Album,” on the other hand, sold 53,000 copies as a complete package — 33,000 on vinyl — and had 94 million streams.The arrival of NewJeans and “Barbie” sent last week’s top album, Taylor Swift’s “Speak Now (Taylor’s Version),” to No. 4, while Morgan Wallen’s “One Thing at a Time” falls to No. 3, the first time in 21 weeks that it has dipped lower than second place. Also this week, “Génesis,” by the Mexican songwriter Peso Pluma, is No. 5. More

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    Popcast (Deluxe): Our Favorite Albums of the Year So Far

    Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicThis week’s episode of Popcast (Deluxe), the weekly culture roundup show on YouTube hosted by Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli, includes segments on their favorite albums of 2023 so far:100 gecs, “10,000 gecs” — the pounding second album from the everything-core duoSkrillex, “Quest for Fire”/“Don’t Get Too Close” — a comeback pair of albums from the big-tent dubstep pioneerYoung Nudy, “Gumbo” — a collection of slinky and slurry rhymes from the Atlanta rap underdogPeso Pluma, “Génesis” — the new album from the breakout star of the new wave of corridos tumbadosVeeze, “Ganger” — a new album of off-kilter rhymes from one of Detroit’s rising rap starsAsake, “Work of Art” — the second studio album from one of the most inventive and emotive Nigerian singersJ Hus, “Beautiful and Brutal Yard” — the third studio album from one of England’s most inventive rappersIce Spice, “Like..?” — the debut EP from the Bronx rapper specializing in crossover drillBb trickz, “Trickstar” — a new EP from Spain’s answer to Ice SpiceBailey Zimmerman, “Religiously. The Album.” — the debut album from the brightest new star in mainstream country musicBar Italia, “Tracey Demin” — the third album from the British alternative rock bandConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. More

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    Review: Braxton’s ‘Trillium’ Gets the Attention It Needs

    Anthony Braxton’s “Trillium X,” part of a sweeping cycle of operas that began in the 1980s, finally premiered in Prague.Anyone bold enough to take command of a pirate ship should also be prepared for strife. Cannon battles? Frustrated crew members? All part of the job.Yet Helena, the captain of the Dragon Lily BX4, must face more than that in the first act of Anthony Braxton’s opera “Trillium X,” which was completed in 2014 but premiered on Tuesday at the DOX Center for Contemporary Art in Prague.After scheming like a titan of industry, and after sending scores of enemies to their watery graves — even after genocidally pledging to foster “the kind of mess that historians will love forever” — Helena still has to deal with those who doubt her ruthlessness. When the pirate discovers some young stowaways aboard her vessel, she learns that they have studied her violent exploits at college. They’re not impressed, calling her “overrated” to her face.It’s one of the best jokes in this opera. And it was hardly the only punchline in the four-act, over-five-hour evening, which had young audience members laughing out loud in the aisles of the museum’s joyously oversold hall.In the role of Helena, the soprano Eva Esterkova deployed a secure vibrato — including in piercing, high-tessitura phrases — that channeled the character’s unflappability. On the whole, the performance came off as a significant milestone in Braxton’s opera career, thanks to some revelatory work by a cast of 12, the Prague Music Performance Orchestra and the conductor Roland Dahinden, a longtime Braxton collaborator. Officially a concert performance, the show had enough video projections and lighting design choices to foment some stage magic, too.Roland Dahinden led the Prague Music Performance Orchestra in the performance.Marek BoudaThis “Trillium X” also served as a reminder of the broader “Trillium” series, an ambitious cycle that Braxton has said will eventually include 36 discrete acts — all of which can then be freely recombined from one production to the next. They have been produced by his own Tri-Centric Foundation on shoestring budgets in the United States. But this performance in Prague demonstrated just how much American opera companies, and audiences, are missing in neglecting this project.You may catch a scrappy outfit like Experiments in Opera delving into the “Trillium” operas at a black box theater, like that company did earlier this year. Braxton’s foundation produced a semi-staged version of “Trillium J” in 2014: a vivacious performance that was released as a Blu-ray, alongside a studio-recorded version. But, sadly, major classical music presenters have shown little interest in this work.That might have something to do with a broadly held perception that Braxton is too abstruse for the mainstream. Since the 1960s, he has long been reputed for the complex, overlapping nature of his many creative guises: as an experimental composer, as a student of jazz and an improviser, and, starting in the 1980s, a creator of music dramas.In the “Trillium” operas, the music seems to always be in flux, moving from pleasingly sour drone states to singsong marches and riotous blasts of orchestral pandemonium. Nor do the plots stay put. As in other “Trillium” works, each act of “Trillium X” featured the same singers, and the same character names, but placed them in entirely different situations. Braxton has expressed affection for the operatic cycles of Wagner and Stockhausen, but with no linear narrative, this is far from the “Ring.”Alongside all the complexity — and here is the too-often undersold part — this stuff is a lot of fun, too. In the semi-staging of “Trillium J,” which is also available on Vimeo, you can see how much the soprano Kamala Sankaram enjoys playing (in her character’s own words) a “helpless maiden who happens to own 400 nuclear weapons stockpile containers — not to mention the chemical gas warfare options.”Featuring the soprano Kamala Sankaram.After the first act on the high seas in “Trillium X,” the second act begins with singers hiding out from robots that have taken away humans’ voting rights, and their ability to get credit. Act III, titled “The Three Sisters,” depicts the joint wedding of a trio of celebrity bank robbers. (Esterkova was once again a key presence during that section’s gun-toting delirium.) The fourth act begins in the White House’s war room, before moving to the site of a Roman orgy.Dahinden’s orchestra responded to the score’s tumultuous moments with precise intonation and enviable balance. But the violins also sound sympathetic and sweet in the second act, as human characters lamented the way they’d allowed robots to slowly take over the world.Video projections (Barbora Jagrova and Tobuke are credited for the lighting and visual designs) that show robots patrolling a doomed, lamp-lit cityscape were both comic and chilling. When one live human singer proposed a détente with the robots, he was greeted with pretaped sounds from the robots, which declared on repeat: “YOU. ARE. WRONG.”Those robot chants, as well as cannon blasts and nuclear explosions in other acts, were delivered by speakers. Singers, too, were amplified. But the sound mix didn’t feel artificial; each portion of the orchestra was audible at all times. In the second act, brass exclamations contributed to an interpolated Braxton piano composition performed by pianist Hildegard Kleeb. (Since Braxton has written that “all compositions in my music system can be executed at the same time/moment,” the insertion of this material — like Composition No. 30 for piano solo, or Composition No. 257, which included the brasses — was fair play.)Braxton’s own Tri-Centric Orchestra deserves more opportunities to play this music in American halls. But the Prague Music Performance Orchestra proved that it can also pull off a credible “Trillium” show; thankfully, the program for Tuesday’s concert advertised the ensemble’s plans to record “Trillium X” and present the live premiere of “Trillium L” in 2025.So this language is not too complex to be learned. This orchestra’s founder and director, Jan Bartos, said in an email that the concert had come together with a week of rehearsal and a budget of about $100,000.More performances of this music, and at a similarly high level, should be possible. A question, then, now hangs over the United States: Who will take on “Trillium” next?Trillium XPerformed on Tuesday at the DOX Center for Contemporary Art in Prague. More

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    Actors are Turning to Cameo Amid SAG-AFTRA Strike

    Others are using the service, through which fans can pay for personalized videos, to engage with followers while not publicly promoting work.On July 24 Cheyenne Jackson, an actor, posted a photo on Instagram that showed him shirtless, with glistening abs, veiny arms and his lips parted.“This is me subtly letting you know I’m back on @cameo,” its caption read.Cameo is a service through which celebrities and others can be paid to make personalized videos commemorating birthdays, bachelorette parties, divorces and the like. Mr. Jackson, who has appeared in the “American Horror Story” TV shows and in “30 Rock,” said in a phone interview that he reactivated his account because of the continuing strike by SAG-AFTRA, the actors’ union.Mr. Jackson, 48, charges $95 for a video message and cited bills — “I have two kids” — as one reason he is on Cameo. “There are only so much sources of income,” he said.“My husband cringed a little,” he added. “But you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.”Since Cameo debuted in 2016, some actors have used it when traditional work has dried up. In 2021, as the pandemic raged, the actor Andrew Rannells joined Cameo to raise money for the Entertainment Community Fund, a nonprofit formerly known as the Actors Fund. On a recent episode of “And Just Like That…,” the “Sex and the City” reboot, the character Che Diaz, played by Sara Ramirez, starts making Cameo videos after a TV pilot is canceled.According to data provided by Cameo, there was a 137 percent increase in the number of accounts reactivated or created on Cameo in July compared to June (the strike started on July 14). The number of orders for videos remained about the same for each month, but Cameo said orders usually drop in July because there aren’t events like graduations and holidays like Father’s Day.Some of the new and reactivated accounts were for people unaffected by the strike, but others were for union actors like Mr. Jackson and Alyssa Milano. Fran Drescher, the SAG-AFTRA president, also reactivated her account, according to Cameo, though it is not currently accepting bookings.The actress Alyssa Milano, who charges $250 for a video message on Cameo, said she was using the service as an income supplement while traditional work has dried up.via CameoThe actress Christa B. Allen said she reactivated her Cameo account as a way to engage with fans at a time when she is making fewer public appearances.via CameoMs. Milano, 50, who charges $250 for a video message, said in an email that Cameo “is a great way to supplement some income during this idle time.” Ms. Drescher’s representatives said she was unavailable to comment for this article.While the actors’ union is on strike, its members are forbidden from filming most projects and from promoting most projects at movie premieres, film festivals and events like Comic-Con. But making Cameo videos, for the most part, is allowed, said Sue-Anne Morrow, the national director of contract strategic initiatives and podcasts at SAG-AFTRA.“As long as there’s no promotion of struck work within the Cameo, there’s no problem,” Ms. Morrow said in an email.In May, around the time that movie and television writers’ unions went on strike, the actors’ union finalized a deal with Cameo that allows its members to have earnings from certain bookings applied toward their health insurance minimum earnings requirement, Ms. Morrow said. Those bookings must be made through Cameo 4 Business, where corporate customers like insurance companies and grocery store chains hire talent for promotional videos.Ms. Morrow said that the union pursued the agreement because Cameo is one of many ways actors can support themselves when they’re not acting.The average price of a Cameo 4 Business booking is $1,700, said Steven Galanis, a founder of Cameo and its chief executive. Non-business bookings — the types of videos Cameo is most known for — average $70. Cameo receives 25 percent of the fee for any booking, and the rest goes to the talent.Mr. Galanis compared the opportunity created by the strike for Cameo to the period of time in the early pandemic when, as he put it, “every other income sort of dried up” for actors and other entertainers. “I’m hoping that the strike ends tomorrow,” he said. “But if it doesn’t, we’re going to be here.”On July 18, days after the actors’ union went on strike, Cameo announced a round of layoffs, which happened a little more than a year after the company laid off 87 workers in May 2022. Mr. Galanis declined to comment on the number of people affected by the recent layoffs, or on the number of people now working at Cameo.Some actors who have started reusing the service since the strike said that making money was not the only reason that they returned to it. Christa B. Allen, who has appeared in the TV show “Revenge” and in the film “13 Going on 30,” said that Cameo offers an opportunity to engage with fans at a time when she is making fewer public appearances.“We’re nothing without our fans,” she said. Cameo, she added, lets actors “connect with the people that love them and have supported their career in a time when they’re not going to be making traditional media.”Ms. Allen, 31, who uses the stage name Christa Belle, reactivated her Cameo account during the strike after using it sporadically since 2017. She charges $75 per booking and said she has made about $1,000 to date.“Cameo is not something I think of as a moneymaker,” she said. More

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    Why Nina Simone Was Always Ahead of Her Time

    A recently unearthed live version of “Blues for Mama,” written by Simone and Abbey Lincoln in the 1960s, took on domestic abuse in a momentous way.Nina Simone was always ahead of her time. And in the mid-1960s she found a fellow musical innovator and ideal feminist collaborator in the jazz vocalist Abbey Lincoln, whom she teamed up with to write the song “Blues for Mama.” When Simone performed it at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1966, she introduced it as “a gutbucket blues.”“It will appeal to a certain type of woman,” she said, “who has had this kind of experience.”That experience was domestic violence, a trauma that the titular Mama endured and that others blamed her for causing. “They say you’re mean and evil/Don’t know what to do,” Simone sang. “And that’s the reason that he’s gone/And left you black-and-blue.”I’ve been intrigued by “Blues for Mama” since I first heard it on Simone’s 1967 album “Nina Simone Sings the Blues.” And now, thanks to Verve Records’ recent issue of the previously unreleased recording of her Newport performance — packaged as the album “You’ve Got to Learn” — we have an even earlier version of the song out in the world.“Blues for Mama” signified a new moment. Rather than accept the abuse and the negative rumors, Nina tells Mama to set the record straight: “It wasn’t you that caused his bitter fate.”The track appears at the album’s midpoint, before the politically trenchant “Mississippi Goddam,” a song Simone wrote in response to two tragedies in 1963: the assassination of the civil rights activist Medgar Evers in Mississippi and the murder of four African American girls in a church bombing in Birmingham, Ala.Her fans are likely to have appreciated “Blues for Mama” as further proof of her musical dexterity and ability to seamlessly move across genres. And it stands out as one of few songs from the era to explicitly take on gender-based violence, actively refusing to blame the victim. “They say you love to fuss and fight/And bring a good man down,” Simone narrated. “And don’t know how to treat him/When he takes you on the town.”At the time, Lincoln, too, was known for both her vocal virtuosity and her radical politics, including her collaboration as the lead singer on “We Insist! Freedom Now Suite,” the civil rights jazz album from the bebop drummer Max Roach, whom she later married. Though “Blues for Mama” is one of Lincoln’s earlier songwriting credits, it isn’t so surprising that she and Simone chose to embed their critique of sexism within a blues format.“Violence against women was always an appropriate topic for the blues,” the activist Angela Davis wrote in the book “Blues Legacies and Black Feminism.” Davis goes on to say that this is because the blues, as a genre, often blurred the boundaries that separate the “private sphere from the public,” making the violence that Black people experience in their homes as lyrically and politically relevant as what happened to them outdoors and on the road.Lincoln and Simone were, in some ways, extending a tradition that dated back to the early 20th century, when classic blues singers recorded songs about domestic violence, among them Ma Rainey in “Black Eye Blues” (written by Thomas A. Dorsey) and Bessie Smith in “Outside of That” (by Jo Trent and Clarence Williams).Later, Billie Holiday sang, “Well, I’d rather my man would hit me/Than for him to jump up and quit me” in her cover of the blues standard “T’ain’t Nobody’s Business if I Do.” (It’s worth noting that Dianne Reeves changed those lyrics in her 1997 take on the song to, “I’d rather my man quit me/Than for him to even rear up and think about how he might even try to hit me.”) Except for Rainey’s “Cell Bound Blues,” about a woman jailed for shooting her violent lover, most blues songs presented abuse against women matter-of-factly and as one of many experiences that led to their feeling the blues.“Blues for Mama” was the rare protest song that could galvanize multiple social justice movements — civil rights, women’s liberation and Black Power — at once. It would take a quarter century for Simone to reveal in her memoir, “I Put a Spell On You,” that her marriage in the 1960s to Andy Stroud was rife with violence, while Lincoln would later allude to the tumult in her relationship with Roach.“He was a great big drummer, but he was a gorilla,” Lincoln told The Chicago Tribune. “I got tired of him ‘gorilla-ing’ me and telling me what I had to do.” She also revisited the themes in the later part of her career when she, divorced from Roach, established herself as a consummate songwriter. She recorded “Blues for Mama” as “Hey, Lordy Mama” in 1995, and addressed abuse in the ballad “And It’s Supposed to Be Love” (1999).Perhaps Simone sensed even back then that “Blues for Mama” would have to be rediscovered to be more fully appreciated. That July evening at the Newport festival, she broke midsong to admonish her audience and declared, “I guess you ain’t ready for that.” More

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    City in Mexico Bans Performances of Songs With Misogynistic Lyrics

    The city of Chihuahua said it would impose hefty fines on bands that perform songs with lyrics that “promote violence against women.”Fed up with persistent violence, officials in the city of Chihuahua in northern Mexico approved a ban last week forbidding musical acts from performing songs with lyrics that degrade women.Mayor Marco Bonilla of Chihuahua said in an video update last week that the law banned the performance of songs that “promote violence against women” or encourage their discrimination, marginalization or exclusion.Mr. Bonilla said that those who violate the ban could face fines ranging from 674,000 pesos to 1.2 million pesos, or between about $39,000 and $71,000.The City Council approved the ban unanimously on Wednesday amid a rise in killings of women across Mexico in recent years, and as Chihuahua, a city of about 940,000 residents, is struggling with its own cases of violence against women. Recently, Mr. Bonilla said, about seven out of 10 calls to 911 in Chihuahua have involved cases of domestic violence, particularly against women.“Violence against women has reached levels that we could consider like a pandemic,” he said. “We can’t allow this to happen, and we also can’t allow this to be normalized.”It was unclear from his message who would impose the fines or how the ban on misogynistic lyrics would be enforced. Money raised from the fines will be channeled to a women’s institute in Chihuahua and a confidential women’s shelter, said Blanca Patricia Ulate Bernal, a Chihuahua city councilwoman who proposed the ban.Ms. Ulate Bernal said in a post on Facebook last week that the law will apply to concerts and events in the city that require a municipal permit. She added that the ban would help ensure that women have the right “to enjoy a life free of violence.”Mr. Bonilla, Ms. Ulate Bernal and other council members did not immediately respond to requests for comment.The lyrics ban was passed about a month after Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, criticized songs known as corridos tumbados, or trap ballads, whose lyrics glorify drug smugglers and violence.“We’re never going to censor anyone,” Mr. López Obrador said at a news conference in June. “They can sing what they want, but we’re not going to stay quiet.”The approval of the ban is not the first time the city of Chihuahua has taken a strong stance against the performance of certain songs. Citing high levels of drug violence, Chihuahua banned the long-running band Los Tigres del Norte in 2012 after a concert during which the group performed three songs known as narcocorridos, which celebrate the exploits of drug traffickers. The city also fined the concert organizers 20,000 pesos, or about $1,600, at the time. More

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    Can a Rapper Change Italy’s Mind About Migrants?

    In mid-March, weeks after a ship wrecked on Italy’s Calabrian coast, the waters of the Mediterranean Sea were still releasing ashore what remained: planks of wood, engine parts, children’s shoes, bodies. The season of drowning migrants had come early this year.Listen to This ArticleFor more audio journalism and storytelling, More

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    ‘Barbenheimer’ Isn’t a Contest. But if It Were, Which Film Would Win?

    It’s been an epic matchup, but it’s time to declare a victor. We devised nine super-scientific tests to determine whether “Barbie” or “Oppenheimer” rules.The simultaneous release of “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” captured the pop-cultural imagination because before we had seen either film, it was hard to imagine two features that occupied such distinctly different lanes. But now that audiences have sampled Greta Gerwig’s colorful Mattel comedy and Christopher Nolan’s weighty drama about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the so-called father of the atomic bomb, it’s become clear that for all their tonal differences, each film is a one-of-a-kind auteurist blockbuster pondering some pretty meaty existential questions.All this is a heady way of saying: Let’s pit ’em against each other!Who would win if there were an actual battle of Barbenheimer? To arrive at an answer, I’ve put each film through its paces in nine categories, with tests devised to measure them that are every bit as scientifically rigorous as the experiments conducted during Oppenheimer’s Manhattan Project. (Note: This claim has not been fact-checked.)Culpability of protagonistTwo experts in the laser death stare: Emily Blunt and Cillian Murphy as the Oppenheimers.Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal PicturesDo Oppenheimer and Barbie both have blood on their hands? After racing to create an atomic bomb that will end World War II, Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) spends the final hour of his movie haunted by visions of the dead and wondering whether he has unleashed a nuclear arms race that will imperil the future of humanity. Barbie (Margot Robbie) is also forced to face her own complicated legacy: Upon entering the real world, where she expects to be greeted as a benevolent superstar, she is instead dressed down by teenage girls who deride her as a fascist has-been whose unrealistic beauty standards have harmed generations of women. At least Barbie can assuage her guilty conscience with a journey of self-discovery and you-go-girl support from America Ferrera; Oppenheimer has to endure a humiliating government hearing and a series of withering looks from Emily Blunt. Then again, it’s a level of flagellation he feels he deserves, which packs even more of a punch. Advantage: “Oppenheimer”Depiction of governanceMen rule the world in “Oppenheimer,” and their government is filled with vipers: After the war ends, battles are waged on the home front as ambitious apparatchiks scheme to discredit their rivals and formerly jovial colleagues are moved to stab one another in the back. The female-led government in “Barbie” rules over a comparative utopia that subs slumber parties for strife and posits that a dangerous coup perpetrated by angry, addled men can be undone simply by tricking them into a musical number. Who wouldn’t rather live in that world? Advantage: “Barbie”Depth of ensembleThe seeds of Barbenheimer were sown early in production as both films raced to cast half of Hollywood in their ever-swelling ensembles, and each cast came with some notable similarities. Leads Murphy and Robbie have both played Batman villains. (He was Scarecrow in Nolan’s Bat-features, while she was Harley Quinn for DC.) Each film features a hot young auteur in the cast — the “Uncut Gems” co-director Benny Safdie pops up throughout “Oppenheimer,” while “Barbie” has a cameo from the writer-director of “Promising Young Woman,” Emerald Fennell — as well as a next-generation Marvel star (Florence Pugh in “Oppenheimer,” Simu Liu in “Barbie”). “Oppenheimer” flexes a bit harder by filling even its smallest roles with Oscar winners like Rami Malek, Kenneth Branagh and Casey Affleck, but “Barbie” had the good sense to wonder what Rhea Perlman has been up to lately, which ought to count for nearly as much. Ultimately, this category is just too close to call. TieFashionTa-da! Margot Robbie’s Barbie pulls off a western look with aplomb.Warner Bros. PicturesBarbie is a famous clotheshorse, and Gerwig’s movie more than delivers on the fashion front: Whether Robbie’s doll is wearing gingham dresses or disco jumpsuits, she takes costumes that could read as cosplay and makes them chic. You might not expect the same attention to sartorial detail from “Oppenheimer,” but 12 films into his career, one of Nolan’s cinematic trademarks has become impeccable suiting: After Oppenheimer is advised by a colleague to level up his look, we watch him don a hat and select a pipe in a sequence that Nolan shoots as portentously as Batman putting on body armor. Still, even though Murphy is striking in period garments, there can be only one victor in this category. We have no doubt that Barbie would look fashionable even in Oppenheimer’s tailored menswear, but could the theoretical physicist pull off her rollerblading look in eye-searing fluorescents? Advantage: “Barbie”CatchphrasesOppenheimer said that after the explosive test of the atomic bomb, a quote from Hindu scripture came to mind: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” In Nolan’s film, we hear those words said by Oppenheimer, but the first time he speaks them is in an unusual sex scene with his recurring flame, Jean Tatlock (Pugh), in which she pauses coitus to fetch a copy of the Bhagavad Gita, then asks Oppenheimer to translate the famous quote from Sanskrit, sans clothes. (Kinky, yes, but Tatlock clearly knows that the way to this man’s heart is to first admire his bookshelf.) “Barbie” has its fair share of quotable lines — two Ken catchphrases, “I’m just Ken” and “I am Kenough,” have already set social media ablaze — but were any of them translated from the original Mattel? Advantage: “Oppenheimer”Usage of the color pinkIf anything pink has ever appeared on the set of one of Nolan’s films, it was only because Harry Styles hadn’t changed out of his concert wear before shooting “Dunkirk.” Meanwhile, “Barbie” features more pink than a clone army of Jigglypuffs downing rosé on the set of “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” You knew who would win this category going in. Advantage: “Barbie”Usage of the color blueThink of the hat as a shield … to protect the audience from those baby blues.Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures, via Associated Press“Oppenheimer” is about the moral cost of unleashing upon mankind the most terrifying and powerful weapon it has ever known: Murphy’s gigantic blue eyes. (Can you get radiation poisoning from a pair of peepers? If you watch “Oppenheimer” in IMAX, you may want to take precautions by gazing upon the screen through a pane of dark glass.) The beautiful cerulean sky of Barbie Land simply can’t compare to what Murphy is serving up: Even in the black-and-white portions of “Oppenheimer,” the actor’s eyes still feel bright blue. Advantage: “Oppenheimer”Sound designIn recent films, Nolan has employed a “wall of sound” approach that hits its apex in “Oppenheimer”: Every single minute is soundtracked by Ludwig Goransson’s propulsive score, while set pieces like the Trinity test and Oppenheimer’s foot-stomping gymnasium rally employ so much thunderous bass that they threaten to shake the entire multiplex. Though the film is a three-hour drama about men in lecture halls, classes and courtrooms, its soundscape blares with the blockbuster momentum of an action film, and for all its sonic sophistication, “Oppenheimer” is surely the front-runner for this year’s best-sound Oscar. Still, “Barbie” has a Dua Lipa song. Advantage: “Barbie”Box officeThe rising tide of Barbenheimer has lifted both films to smash-hit status. “Barbie” scored the biggest opening weekend of the year with $162 million, barely faltered in its second week, and is now on track to pass more than $1 billion worldwide and potentially dethrone “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” as the year’s top grosser. And though other prestige dramas have struggled to connect at the box office since the pandemic, “Oppenheimer” has been thriving: Its $82 million opening weekend far surpassed any of Nolan’s non-superhero features, and the film’s final worldwide total could top $800 million, a stunning finish for a super-long biopic. Though “Barbie” is the clear winner here, this is a race with no loser. Advantage: “Barbie”Final resultThink pink! In the battle of Barbenheimer, Gerwig’s comedy ekes out a victory over “Oppenheimer,” proving that some fights can be finished with no nuclear escalation whatsoever. (But how would Gerwig’s “Little Women” fare against Nolan’s previous film, “Tenet”? Watch this space: If the strikes continue, I may have to write that.) More