Another “Barbie” Oscars Snub: Best Whistler!

Lewis grew up in Australia and Los Angeles. Her father, Mark Lewis, makes documentaries about animals. “Cane Toads: An Unnatural History,” a film of his from 1988, is “quite famous in Australia,” Lewis noted. (A sequel, “Cane Toads: The Conquest,” came out in 2010.) Lewis learned to whistle when she was four. “I remember finally making a sound and being quite pleased with myself,” she recalled. For her birthday one year, her parents gave her a CD of Steve (The Whistler) Herbst whistling Broadway covers, and she realized that she could whistle along. She taught herself how to make a sound breathing in as well as out, so that she could whistle uninterrupted. When she was a teen-ager, her parents showed her the documentary “Pucker Up,” about the International Whistlers Convention, in Louisburg, North Carolina. “My dad told me, ‘If you ever get into that competition, I’ll take you there.’ ”