They seem miserable and well-matched.

I didn’t. I haven’t followed an awards season since 2012 - 13. After that year the show became too focused on pandering to social media, which really cheapened the whole thing. I think the Ellen DeGeneres selfie was the year after that, no? Case in point.

I watched some of last year’s since I read there was going to be a Godfather reunion and I wanted to see Diane Keaton or James Caan (or even Talia Shire), but no dice. I turned it off before The Slap, but I was taken aback by how cheap everything looked. From a production standpoint, it looked about on par with the MTV Movie Awards. Maybe it’s the always unflattering digital sheen of today’s cameras, which tend to flatten everything into looking like a daytime soap, but not a speck of glamour was in sight.

I only watched a few of this year’s nominees. The Whale was an abomination. I was pulling for Colin Farrell since he does consistently great work and seems to be one of few contemporary actors who has the rough wit and charm of an Old Hollywood star, like a Richard Burton or Peter O'Toole. My favorite movie of the year was Blonde: I loved it and I thought Ana De Armas, who I’d never paid attention to before, was incredible. It felt like a sequel to The Day of the Locust and a perfect foil to the superficial and patronizing “Free Britney”-esq content we’ve been fed the last few years that proffer sanitized interpretations of female tabloid figures - but that’s a tangent for another day. I imagine Lindsay Lohan is kicking herself, though, since if anyone was meant to play a terrorized, nude, threesome-loving Marilyn Monroe, it’s her. In fact, the movie reminded me a lot of her graphic Linda Lovelace biopic that never came to fruition (not to be confused with the bland Amanda Seyfried one from around the same time).

I could probably make some moral argument against that account, but I can’t say I care, honestly. I lapped up much nastier gossip back in the days of the tabloids and blogs. Really, I think my main gripe with the person running DeuxMoi is that they’re not very good at it. Good gossip has some wit and levity to it - even Perez was capable of a funny turn of phrase every now and then. But whoever’s running the DeuxMoi page has the cadence, written and otherwise, of a teenager. So imagine my surprise when it turned out the account’s mystery proprietor is supposedly a woman in her thirties.

I guess it’s a matter of taste, too. I don’t have an interest in most of the people that make up the account’s submissions, which seem to be juvenile and mainly fan-driven (a lot of teen fans posing as industry insiders and misspelling words like "producer"). Which isn’t new, to be fair. I remember toward the end of his reign at E!, Ted Casablanca cooked up a lot of suspect blind items that seemed to be wish fulfillment for fans. The quack that runs Crazy Days and Nights (whom DM promotes a lot) built his blog on the same thing, trawling fan forums and comment sections to spin stories that would appeal to particular fanbases and keep them coming back for more. With social media, the boundary between “stan” and scribe is nonexistent now, so this kind of pandering is incessant and the types of celebrities that dominate the coverage on a page like DM seem to appeal mostly to kids with endless free time and an Internet connection.

I don’t know if anyone remembers, but there used to be this juicy Tumblr back in 2012 called "Fashion Industry Confessions.“ Like DM, it was based on reader submissions, but they at least had an air of credibility. I don’t know the first thing about the fashion world, but that didn’t really matter; the gossip people sent in had a certain connoisseurship of the business (certain photographers, agencies, editors, etc.) that made it fun to read and as if someone was leaning and whispering in your ear. No one at DM, let alone DM herself, seems to really know what they’re talking about, so every other submission seems to follow a pattern: [TV streaming actor fad of the week] is really hot right now and getting casted [sic] in a really big project!!!

You know what I mean? I don’t know if I have any longtime followers, but back in the early years of this blog I used to do similar posts compiling celebrity stories and encounters people sent in (I called them "dirt” posts). And I’m sure, like DM, a large chunk of it was bullshit, but I at least tried to filter out anything too fan-y. 

I know this all probably sounds like sour grapes, but I’m not jealous. Honest! I’m just a dick. You guys know that well enough. And I’m curious to see how long DM lasts before she/it tapers out. Perez’s big undoing was his "selling out" - when he became too close to the stars he was writing about, his readers turned on him. I don’t follow DM, so I only absorb its content in bits and pieces, but from what I’ve seen the owner has fallen into a similar trap. Too much sponsored content and PR-friendly fluff, and a pretty clear goal, like Perez, to make herself into a brand and celebrity. I wish her luck.

popculturediedin2009:

Mischa Barton and Brandon Davis at Coachella, May 2004

Nah, I’m burnt out with celebrity confessionals. It seems like every other week there’s a new tell-all or “documentary.” The last memoir I bought was Hayley Mills’ a year or two ago. Good for Pam, though. I liked her blog back in the day.

I’m not really surprised. The brand of snark that made Gawker unique in its day has pretty much been absorbed by anyone with a Twitter now, and why go to a website to read what’s already been broken down into a dozen Twitter threads? I liked a couple of the writers at Gawker 2.0, but most of the stuff there was just that - summaries of stuff I’d already seen on Twitter. Plus, it seemed to be too much “Defamer” and not enough Gawker. Where’s the media industry gossip that made the original site fun? Where’s Judith Regan (or whoever her successor of today may be)?

The layout of the new site was pretty heinous, too. Maybe my tastes are outdated, but I really miss the simple site layouts of the olden days, when you just clicked and went to another page. Everything has an infinite scroll now, and most sites don’t even have a working tagging system anymore. It’s a nightmare to navigate, especially for the archival stuff I do for this blog and my Twitter. When Gawker relaunched, the new layout screwed up the old tagging system and left a lot of dead links to stories I’d previously saved. I can still find some of them by doing a Google search or using the Wayback Machine, but Google isn’t as reliable as it used to be, and even with specific keywords it’s harder to find stuff now.

I just hope that when the site goes down again, the server still stays up like it did when the site first shut down years ago. Too many old gossip sites and forums have been wiped from the Internet, and a trove of stories, pictures, and videos have gone with them. Every week I discover another site that I’ve used for my digging has disappeared, and there’s no way of accessing most of that stuff again.

I just choose what I think is interesting or fun. No rhyme or reason. At the start of every month I’ll comb through a few gossip site archives and save a bunch of stories, then mark up a calendar with particular anniversaries. With each thread I lead with a standout story (this week’s was Beyonce’s inauguration lip-sync drama), then follow up with random stories that I thought were worth digging up - not necessarily things that were "big" at the time. Some people are confused by those threads, I’m not sure why. I think it’s pretty straightforward.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: why hasn’t anyone staged an intervention about Paris’ veneers? Her mouth looks like a bunch of chiclets.

To update an old adage: those who can’t do, teach talk about it on TV.

I’m not really surprised. I thought FOX would snatch her up first, but I’m guessing NBC had an in given Savannah Gummy Guthrie’s husband worked as a consultant for Johnny’s legal team. And this fits in with NBC’s pattern of generally being terrible - see: Trump, Weinstein, Lauer et al. The much-ballyhooed “post-#MeToo” era doesn’t seem to be much different from what it was before. Go figure.

Anyway, I think this was the inevitable next step for Camille, since if the trial showed anything, she’s not that bright. Compared to Ben Chew, who was fine, Camille came off as a shrill Legally Blonde wannabe who watched too many an episode of Law & Order and delivered each question with the cadence of Elle Woods trying to catch Chutney in a shower slip-up, even when it resulted in embarrassment. But good ol’ misogyny and victim-blaming won out in the end, so she was able to keep her reputation and TikTok deification intact. Plus, people tend to put a lot of unnecessary stock in celebrity lawyers. It’s that whole “the best money can buy” fantasy, which is totally bogus. The late prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, who put away Manson, tackled this brilliantly in his book about the O.J. case, Outrage, in the ‘90s. I took pictures of the relevant pages. If there were a PCD2009 book club, that would be at the top of the syllabus. A total must-read for anyone interested in the intersection of law, media, and celebrity.

In it, Bugliosi pointed out that O.J.’s acclaimed “Dream Team” was largely incompetent with an unimpressive track record going into the trial: Johnnie Cochran was mainly a civil lawyer whose last big case at the time was Michael Jackson’s child molestation drama, which he resolved with a $20 million dollar settlement from Michael to the little boy, and let’s face it, it doesn’t take expert legal maneuvering to tell someone to hand over a wad of cash; Robert Shapiro had never handled a murder trial before, bar the Christian Brando case, which ended with his client pleading guilty; F. Lee Bailey’s last big client was Patty Hearst, and he lost; and Alan Dershowitz wasn’t even a defense lawyer - he was only there to build an appeals case. Yet at the time, the media fell over themselves to praise these guys by noting their boldfaced clientele, not caring for the specifics of any of the cases or even if they won or lost them. Just by being associated with celebrities, they were decreed to be the best of the best.

The same applies here. By virtue of her being hired by a beloved movie star, Camille was assumed to be the “best” despite having no significant track record before taking the case. And because of this assumption, people elevated her performance in the courtroom to a stroke of brilliance, treating every line of questioning, no matter how inane (remember when she tried to ask Amber about her song choice for a Flipagram video?), like it was a masterclass in cross-examination. And chances are if you expect greatness, you’ll eventually convince yourself of it. We tend to see what we want to.

The converse is true, too. Because of Amber’s loss, a lot of people, including her supporters, point fingers at her lawyers and say they didn’t do a good enough job. I disagree. Even though the evidence was on her side, there was no winning with a jury who, by their own admission, thought she and Johnny ’abused each other’ but still decided against her; who said that if Amber kept her mouth shut, maybe Johnny would’ve helped her with her career, disregarding Johnny’s own text messages that were shown in court where he conspired to get Amber fired from Aquaman, ages before her op-ed was even published. You can’t win against stupid.

popculturediedin2009:

Lil Kim talks to paparazzi, January 2008