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The Red Carpet is Dead. (May it stay that way.)
As a person of middling intelligence who spent his adult life working in entertainment, the lost year of 2020 has been keenly instructive. The show business I grew up in, long in the throes of disruption, has experienced a near-extinction event in Covid-19. The explosion in streaming allows for hope, but the leaders of the giant media concerns are having as much trouble navigating that chaotic landscape as you are finding something decent to watch on Friday night. Meantime, the layers-thick industrial cladding around traditional Hollywood—a venerable apparatus dwarfing tiny creative nuggets spat out at the center — has been disintegrating. This was true before the pandemic, but the upending of most everything, from production schedules to blockbuster release dates to the usual awards season calendar, makes for a nifty accelerant. The breaking down and rebuilding of our hoary culture machinery is inevitable and necessary, and lends itself to righteous sloganeering about the brave new, more inclusive world that may just replace it. But it won’t come without blood on the floor in the legacy industry, which still precariously employs tens of thousands of actual human beings. We are only at the beginning of a painful process of redefining what show business even is, let alone who gets to work in it. Change has a way of being terribly exciting and terrible at the same time.
For the past 30 years or so, the sort of display case for this fading establishment Hollywood (tenuously headquartered in Los Angeles, but a hegemony sprinkled throughout the Anglosphere) was the red carpet, a promotional device that has been rolled up and tucked away during our long months of crisis. Here and there, it has been replaced by virtual or socially distanced approximations, which despite the very best efforts of many creative minds, have been dreary. During this hiatus, many show people have been trying to convince themselves that a return to public spaces will mean that the red carpet, as public spectacle, will be back, and as the posters for sequels used to say, better than ever. In Zoom meetings and on Microsoft Teams, executives invested in the red carpet project insist this will be so, while smiling tightly, reassuring nervous corporate partners that Hollywood, now liberated from its confinement, will erupt rapturously in a razzly, dazzly hedonism not seen since the roaring ‘20s.
That’s the sunny way of thinking, and Hollywood events will surely return, spurred by muscle memory if nothing else. But Big Red Carpet—at least as a sort of supercharged media and marketing juggernaut that grabs the sustained attention of millions of mostly female consumers—has been in decline for a considerable period. A moment for some history: Red carpets date back to the early 1900s, when railroads unfurled them for V.I.P. customers, and became synonymous with the glitzy Hollywood premiere by the middle of the last century. The peak carpet of Bjork’s swan dress and E!, of celebrity weeklies and lately of Mario Lopez, is the spawn of the 1980s, when the media, fashion, and beauty industries transformed awards shows into mass audience behemoths. From the ‘90s to the mid-2000s that carpet was the nexus of Big Things: Big Movies, Big Networks, Big Press, Big Fashion, Big Beauty, Big Stars, and Very Big Audiences. This is not our fragmented, fractious media landscape of today.
Given that — and with the caveat that that this would cause severe, undeserved distress to armies of flacks, hacks, gussiers, fluffers, and manufacturers of chocolate Oscars — it’s worth asking if whether the old-fashioned premiere, the extravagant junket, the bloated awards show and its various handmaidens (the swag suite, the lavishly sponsored viewing dinner and after party, multi-room package at the Four Seasons) are luxuries Hollywood should persist on indulging in. I take no joy in writing this; with the exception of actual famous people and their handlers, few people have trod as many red carpets as I have. One of the cardinal rules of being on the carpet, no matter how sweaty one’s arm pits or achey one’s foot, is to never complain about it, for surely there are legions of people out there whose fondest dream is to swap places with you under the scalding lights. And it’s true that for a good 15 minutes, there is no place as glamorous as the red carpet at the Academy Awards. Still, in recent years, participating in such events can leave one with the feeling of having sat through Latin mass in an ancient cathedral. There’s a mystical alchemy in the ritual, linked to dimly remembered time, but most eyeballs in the modern world have drifted elsewhere.
On April 25, the Academy Awards will take place, and fewer people than ever will pay attention. The circumstances this year are exceedingly peculiar, but even if they were not, some soul searching would be in order. Whinging about the state of the Academy Awards is already a decades-long tradition. Who are these movies for? Where are the audiences? Is this a piece of broad entertainment, a serious intellectual exercise, or a trade show? This is not the fault of the Academy or the talent. It’s simply that the brief —Cultural Relevance! Artistic Quality! Fashion! Mass Appeal! Fun!-is impossible. Whatever the future of theatrical distribution, the promise of streaming is that it will break down the arbitrary line between film and television and theoretically make great storytelling readily accessible to all (or at least those who can afford to subscribe). But the availability of this year’s Oscar-nominated movies on streaming platforms has not made them more broadly known to the masses. Fragmentation is likewise a profound issue for the Emmy Awards, which air on network television but reward work seen on emerging platforms, seen largely by a tastemaking elite. Only the Grammys, which have the virtue of being a series of actual performances, can make a claim to a more universal appeal.
A generation ago, for better and worse, a monolithic media landscape meant that everybody knew who was famous and what was playing at the multiplex or airing on NBC on Thursday night. Mass audiences tuned into the Oscars and Emmys for the rare opportunity to get a glimpse of their favorite, very widely known, stars, and what happened at awards shows could be hashed over for days (even weeks). Certain aspects of that enterprise — judging how famous women look in what they are wearing — became an enormous business, but that is now thoroughly beyond the pale.
Journalists, or “hosts,” or approximations thereof who work the carpet are, like most everyone, easily seduced by proximity to famous people. In not a few instances, they delude themselves into thinking they are famous themselves. This is a tribe that spends hours before the show begins, posing in borrowed clothing with cheeks sucked in and hands on hips, hoping to boost their Instagram feeds. Like an unhealthy percentage of people in Los Angeles, on-camera red carpet reporters tend to want to join their subjects on the other side, in the gauzy and blessed land of actual celebrity. There is something poignant about this, because it cannot happen. The best red carpet reporters know this, but this is not a job for
In the meantime, tell your friends!
June 26, 2024
