Billie Eilish Laughs Off Standing Ovation After ‘What Was I Made For?’ Performance at 2024 Oscars
Billie Eilish took the stage with brother Finneas O’Connell at the 2024 Oscars on Sunday, March 10, to perform an emotional rendition of “What Was I Made For?” from Barbie, bringing the movie’s director, Greta Gerwig, to tears.
Eilish changed into an outfit featuring pinker tones for the Academy Awards performance. After wrapping up the song, Eilish appeared surprised when receiving a standing ovation but laughed it off.
Eilish, 22, and O’Connell’s “What Was I Made For?” was up for Best Original Song at the awards show along with Becky G’s “The Fire Inside” from Flamin’ Hot, Ryan Gosling’s “I’m Just Ken” from Barbie, Jon Batiste’s “It Never Went Away” from American Symphony and Scott George’s “Wahzhazhe (A Song for My People)” from Killers of the Flower Moon.
Following their Oscar nomination, Eilish and O’Connell, 26, thanked the Academy in a sweet statement.
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“We are incredibly honored to receive a nomination for ‘What Was I Made For?’ As lifelong fans of film, music in film and the Academy Awards, this means everything to us,” the duo wrote via Instagram in January. “We are so grateful to the Academy, its members, and to be recognized alongside so many songwriters that we respect and admire. Our deepest gratitude and thanks go out to the incomparable Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach for their genius vision and execution, the entire Barbie cast and crew, Lucky Chap Entertainment and the Warner Bros. Pictures team.”
The duo went on to show appreciation for Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt, who weaved “[their] song into the fabric and heart of [Barbie] so well.”
“And a special shoutout to Margot Robbie for her incredible foresight as a producer and brilliant performance that resonated with us so profoundly when writing this song. We are truly honored. Thank you,” they concluded.
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Eilish and O’Connell previously took home the award for Song of the Year at the 2024 Grammys in February.
“I’m shocked out of my balls,” Eilish said in her acceptance speech before thanking her family and Gerwig, 40, for “making the best movie of the year.”
After the Grammys, Eilish revealed that a dark episode in her life influenced her to write “What What I Made For?”
“I felt kind of outside the box. I felt isolated in my own world, and I really was in a period of my life where I did not feel seen at all,” she told reporters after the awards ceremony. “And then the way people reacted when it came out, I was completely blown away by the way I felt understood. And this just goes even farther than that.”
Eilish and O’Connell won their first Oscar in 2022 for their song “No Time to Die” from the James Bond film of the same name.
