‘Fess up. You’ve done it, too: made your Oscar acceptance speech into the shampoo bottle.
It’s OK. We all want to be lauded, feted, celebrated. (No wonder the word celebrity shares the same Latin root, celebratus.) The honoring and lauding of each other is one of the reasons we get into relationships: we shine the spotlight on each other the way we collectively shine it on those we deem worthy of glory. It’s one of the reasons we compete so hard when it counts, and one of the reasons we love the Olympics and other big sports events: it gives us pleasure to live vicariously through another’s triumph. Sometimes, it gives us hope. We see, for example, that Kathryn Bigelow didn’t work for nearly a decade before making The Hurt Locker and experiencing her subsequent “moment of a lifetime” last night. Her struggles assuage some of ours.
For years, the Oscars entranced me. I was an actress for a few years and thus naturally wanted to win one. You know, all the way from Dallas.
And then the awards annoyed me: it grated that we didn’t celebrate brain surgeons, astronauts, teachers, engineers, scientists and others who really make a difference in the real world, not some fantasy one. The whole thing smacked of marketing and superficiality and exclusion. It bothered me that the day after, we journalists would breathlessly cover the winners and losers and their hairstyles — as opposed to covering, oh, say, two wars happening simultaneously. I saw the ceremony as a displacement of priorities, and as setting a bad example of what we should value in society.
But Hollywood indeed greases some economic wheels. And there is a place (although we have inflated it) for escapism and storytelling. And, as Bill Maher put it the other night, Hollywood films are some of the few American entities for which the world still clamors.
Also, the clothes are pretty fabulous.
Still. Hollywood does encapsulate what — and who — we value in society. And if we let it, it can makes us feel small in comparison. The whole idea of Hollywood is dedicated to the premise that celebrities — those we celebrate — are closer to the divine. That’s why we call it celebrity worship. And that’s where the Latin celebratus originated: thousands of years ago, we decided to separate a cloistered few from society, and we decided that the rest of us, by definition, didn’t — and don’t — favorably compare.
Again, we do this.
Until we don’t.
Do you O.D. on celebs?
A friend of mine told me that she stopped watching the Oscars because she always felt depressed walking into her cubicle the next day. Her life of baby spittle and corporate clothing and the grocery run seemed less glamorous, less exotic, and less worthy of praise. Teasing out the theme, another friend of mine, a Stanford grad, successful lawyer and new mom in North Carolina, stopped reading fashion magazines because they made her “feel crummy” about herself and her lovely, attainable figure.
If you find yourself dedicating much of your free time at work to ogling celebrity gossip or celebrity fashion sites, check your emotional temperature after you visit them. Do they add to your life? Does the splash of beauty and flash buoy you on a tough day? Or does “that world” make you feel worse about yours? Do you find yourself spending a disproportionate amount of time on them (as opposed to, say news sites or sites that help you learn more about your world or yourself)? Do you know more about Brangelina’s love life than you do about what’s going on in Afghanistan or in the health care debate? If so, how do you feel about that? Do you want to pull back from the celeb worship but still crave glamour and a bit of escapism?
Celebrating yourself:
If so, remember that can you inject glamour, beauty and zip into your own life, yourself. We’ll expand on that one in future posts.
Meantime, I’ll leave you with this, a line from one of my favorite poets:
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume, you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
–Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, 1855
And go thank your mother. ;)
Celebrating you,
Holly
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