Here come the Oscars: still a cruel joke in a cruel town

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/18/oscars-awards-night-winner-tv

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This Sunday sees the Academy awards ceremony in Los Angeles, an institution denounced in 1943 by Marion Davies, the would-be star whose relationship with the press baron WR Hearst was satirised in Citizen Kane. She said: “The Oscar is a cruel joke hatched up by a cruel town and handed out in a cruel ceremony.”

She had a point. As George Clooney remarked at the Golden Globes: in each category, only one person out of the five can win. There is an 80% failure level. Every year, Oscars night creates a huge iceberg of suppressed pain under the peak of a winner’s joy. Then the disappointed losers have to show up at the afterparties to put a brave or defiant face on it.

We imagine that the A-listers' enjoyment is far in advance of the ‘looky-loos'

Oscars fans often gasp at the sheer A-list status of those red-carpet superstars, the aristocrats or even deities of our modern age. What must it be like to be them, so far above the straining reporters, media hangers-on and “looky-loos” – the gawping fans?

We imagine that their enjoyment of the event is far in advance of anything mere mortal onlookers can experience. But actually, I suspect it’s the other way round: Oscars night is a secret ordeal of stress for the stars, for whom success is a fleeting, dazed, dreamlike experience and failure a recurrent nightmare. The only people enjoying the night are the people at home watching it on TV, gobbling snacks and making smart-aleck remarks on social media. These will include me, incidentally: liveblogging the event for this newspaper.

Welcome to instant Salem

I have been obsessing over Jon Ronson’s brilliant and pertinent essay in the New York Times – actually an excerpt from a forthcoming book – about the ugly phenomenon of Twitter-shaming and mob bullying.

Ronson begins by discussing a fatally misjudged tweet by a PR person in New York: an offensive Aids joke to her 170 followers. This undoubtedly objectionable wisecrack went viral and called down global wrath on her head, causing her to have a breakdown whose effects lingered long after Twitter had entirely forgotten about her. It is a kind of mob justice that is not interested in the defendant’s previous good character, or indeed in rehabilitation after sentence.

Ronson reflects on the discrepancy between the original offence and the fanatically punitive response, with its weird recreational element. I think he is on to something, and his essay might be a turning-point. Twitter-shaming allows people who complacently think of themselves as basically nice to indulge in the dark thrill of bullying – in a righteous cause. Perhaps Ronson’s article will cause a questioning of Twitter’s instant-Salem culture of shame.

When PG met HSBC

HSBC continues to suffer an ordeal of bad publicity about its dodgy tax-avoidance wheezes and connections with Tory and Labour grandees. But there is one trump card its PR department could play.

In 1900 its parent group, Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, employed PG Wodehouse as junior clerk in London, amiably allowing him long lunches to watch the cricket. Wodehouse wrote in the evenings, and by 1902 he had the income and confidence to go full time as a freelance writer. Without HSBC, he might never have begun his career.

As it happens, he converted his experiences at HSBC into a book, Psmith in the City, in which Mike Jackson, a likable soul not dissimilar to Wodehouse himself, takes a job in the New Asiatic Bank, where his friend Psmith is also employed. But it is run by an unsympathetic fellow called Bickersdyke, who gets elected as a Unionist MP and is a member of the Senior Conservative Club. Perhaps Wodehouse’s teasing of bankers and their political aspirations means HSBC is unlikely to claim him as one of its own.