- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
I wonder if Chris Penn and Shelley Winters had to pass because there was no oxygen for their burning spirits in the airtight Hollywood terrarium this year.
No self-indulgent Hollywood hack, no dazzled-by-his-own-mythos Academy PR stooge could have written a more laughable Harlequin-rejected line, one that masquerades as a poignant lament only in the mind of its author. My only hope is that Ms. Wilson is deepening the irony so much as to mock Hollywood's own worries about its loss of cachet and courage, but I doubt it.
I am no industry insider. I live in flyover country and I'm over 40 and I work for the church, and I take second place to no one in the desperation of my un-coolness. But I bet I know why Reese Witherspoon won, and it has nothing to do with the Stepford-cum-June Cleaver conspiracy Ms. Wilson imagines. I could be very wrong, but my guess is that Ms. Witherspoon won because more of the Academy voters liked her performance than liked any of the other women's, and cast their ballots accordingly.
As for Jon Stewart, it could be that writers who spend time satirizing political events and people in the real world found themselves at a loss when called upon to do the same for people whose work and lives exist only in make-believe, and that parody has no room to work in a culture that is already stuffed full of self-parody. Or it could be that he hit his peak with Talk Soup and this is just a harsh way of learning it.
Sheesh.
