The Oscars
We don’t have a news story about this year’s Oscars winners. Why not? you may ask (or not, depending on your interest). The answer is simple: Monday is supposedly my day off and I have regular commitments on Monday mornings and so, by the time I got in front of the computer, everyone knew the results anyway. After all, the Oscar winners are one of the few (vaguely) theatre-related stories which the national press carries.
So, congratulations to Daniel Day-Lewis and Tilda Swinton and commiserations to those who were in the running but didn’t make it. I have to say, though, that I can’t really work up much enthusiasm and it rather looks as though people are beginning to feel the same way. One little known fact about the 80th Oscars is that the US TV coverage now holds the record for having the lowest audience figures since records began in 1974. It was 32m, which is 23m down on the highest ever, in 1998, the year of Titanic, and one million down on 2003, just after the invasion of Iraq. I don’t have any international (including UK) figures.
It’s probably partly because most of the films were either European or didn’t do particularly well at the box office (or both) but I wonder if people are getting a bit sick of the hype? I know I’m fed up to the back teeth with the celebrity obsession which seems to infect the print and broadcast media. Popping into W H Smith’s recently I couldn’t believe the number of magazines dedicated to “celebs”, some (most) of whom I’d even heard of. OK, the difference between the celebs at the Oscars and those who seem to live by the number of mentions they get in the press is that the former actually have talent but even then the number of column inches (sorry: centimetres) devoted to how much flesh the women were displaying outstrips (yes: deliberately chosen word) any talk of the films and/or performances by a huge margin.
It seems that celebrity doesn’t require any talent, skill, contribution to society or anything like that. All it needs is to be known and suddenly people want to read about you, look at pictures of you and - especially - learn all about your love life. And you make money out of it too! You might just be 20 and have done nothing more with your life than sat in the Big Brother house but you can publish your (ghost-written) autobiography, launch your own fashion label and get on the front page of The Sun.
What a sad society we live in.