The Selfie
It’s 2014 and Ellen Degeneres is hosting the Oscars. Midway through the show, she walks through the crowd and gathers everyone around her to take a selfie. The resulting image goes viral and breaks some kind of record. It was staged to break that record and became a lot of older people’s entry into the world of the internet. The image is full to bursting with celebrities we love (at the time). It is the end of an era.
Soon we would sour on almost every person in the photo. Kevin Spacey. Ellen. The last pillar of a functioning society, Brangelina, would split and begin a lengthy divorce process that is still going on. We would chew up and spit out Jennifer Lawrence before the Hunger Games franchise finished. It appears the last truly beloved celebrities are Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, and Lupita Nyong’o’s brother. Jury’s still out on Bradley Cooper.
The selfie is less important as a meme. It barely counts as one and is more than anything, a cultural artifact. An attempt by the Oscars (and Ellen) to gain power over their relationship to the internet. The Oscars don’t really have trouble creating viral moments, they just have trouble having ones they can control. The Slap, the La La Land/Moonlight debacle, Adele Dazeem. All of these are gafs. They are unscripted moments that are forever remembered by the internet. None of which happened at the direction of the writers or producers.
The internet as an audience is hard to pander to when you’re an institution like the Oscars. The mistake they make is thinking they need to change for the internet. They don’t understand that we want to make of it what we will. To form our own opinions and point and laugh. We watch to find moments to pick apart. If the desire is viewers, the best thing the oscars could do is make a show worth watching. The rest will follow. The internet is an endless conversation and if there’s nothing to discuss we have a hard time enjoying it. Ariana Debose’s little number will live on forever because we, the internet, decided how to feel about it. More people need to take big swings to grab our attention. What’s that saying shoot for the moon and even if you miss you’ll live on in infamy among gay guys on twitter?
The Ellen Selfie is the wrong way to capture our attention. For avid Oscar fans, we keep telling people what we want. We want spectacle and spectacle provides the opportunity for gafs. When things go right, you have a captive audience. When things go wrong, you also have a captive audience. In the world of Marvel Movies, where every thing has been focused grouped to death and we watch the same story over and over again, we lose the opportunity for excitement. People want the feeling of something new. In media and entertainment, we crave newness and risks. That’s why we go to the movies. If we want sameness and comfort we turn to television.
The Ellen selfie feels like a misunderstanding of logic. These people forget that we want chaos, or the illusion of chaos. Ellen gathering everyone round to take an iconic photo is not interesting to watch and does not create an interesting photo. We don’t want to see how the sausage is made. We want to get a sneak peak that wasn’t allowed.
Even if we’re being tricked, we don’t care as long as the trick is well hidden. Jennifer Lawrence, (who is back in our good graces fyi) famously tripped when accepting her award. Plenty of people thought it was staged and it very well may have been but we didn’t see her practice it. We didn’t watch an over exaggerated Robert De Niro stick out his foot as an obviously scripted bit of nonsense. We only saw the fall and we only get the picture. We also get something to argue about and debate how much of celebrity is orchestrated and how much is spontaneous, something we love to do. We get our conversation and our conspiracy.
The Ellen selfie captures manufactures something i normally love. Weird celebrity group photos. The ones that comes from the Met Gala or The Vanity Fair party are fun because we are left to our own imagination as to how they came about. Are these people really besties? Did their publicists make them take this photo together? Are they in a secret relationship? Normally we get to infer and discuss. In this instance, we know how they all got together. They were sitting together. They all just happened to be there. The celebrities in this photo have no natural charisma together. They were just there.
This image marks an impasse of culture. Of course looking back, knowing what we now know about everything, we couldn’t recreate this image. But it seems this was the last moment this image could be taken. In my mind we’ve learned all the wrong lessons from the Ellen selfie. We’ve dismantled the wrong parts of celebrity culture. We don’t know what to build in its place or what to do with the parts we have left. Celebrity and technology and pageantry have all been intercepted wrong. We say we hate rich people, yet can’t look away. We forgot that the purpose of these rich people is to entertain us. We don’t them to be activists. They’re bad at it. We want the song and dance. We want them to put on a show not complain about the fact that they have to.
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There is a future for the Oscars in the world of the internet. Everyone’s so afraid of TikTok and the new media landscape. If we consider what TikTok offers, as far as form, TikTok might be the savior of the show. You have a 3 minute limit to the bits. All you have to do is post them to TikTok. The SAG awards learned this lesson and someone is putting all the “I am an actor” clips on the app. Those have been around forever and they work on TikTok because they’re short and entertaining. You actually can bend technology to fit the old ways. You just have to meet them halfway. Make an entertaining show first and after the fact someone can cut it up and throw it on TikTok.
Earlier this week someone posted this Best Costume Design Fashion Show on Twitter. It is entertaining, short, and shows off the medium being awarded. This would kill on TikTok and its from 1996. In fact, if someone were to digitize the old footage and put fun clips on TikTok, you could inspire a whole new generation to love the Oscars. You could even do it from the official academy TikTok page. The internet and the academy can work together, without the help of Ellen Degeneres.