Sleeping Walking in Hollywood

Let's play a game.

Who brought snarkiness to Hollywood's awards extravaganza?

Would you even hesitate for a minute? Or do you live in a vacuum?

Of course the answer is Ricky Gervais at the Golden Globes. If you look back at the coverage of the Golden Globes by Hollywood reporters, you will see a triumph of the new media over the old. You can even call it the overturning of authority.

You know this because although Gervais seems to have become unmentionable in the media, his viperish jokes live on Youtube and innumerable little websites that snared the video.

Here are a couple of quotes:

• About the movie I Love You Phillip Morris: "... two heterosexual actors pretending to be gay - so the complete opposite of some famous Scientologists, then."
  
  
• "It seems like everything this year was three-dimensional... except the characters in The Tourist."
  
  
• "It's gonna be a night of partying and heavy drinking. Or as Charlie [Sheen] calls it: breakfast"
  
  
• Introducing Bruce Willis as "Ashton Kutcher's dad".
  
  

(Thanks to the Telegraph for the wording. My memory's not that good.)

Then yesterday, the LA Times wrote this headline: "Are the Oscars copying the Golden Globes' cyber strategy?"

The story quoting an anonymous reporter said this: "'Why are the Oscars going so crazy using social media to promote the show?' another Oscar reporter asked me yesterday. 'Are they just trying to reach a younger, hipper audience?'"

It's funny that they don't mention Gervais at all.

The NY Times inches closer in its echo of this today: "In one of the latest promotions for the Oscar telecast on Sunday, the hosts, James Franco and Anne Hathaway, do something almost unheard of: they spoof the self-seriousness of the whole endeavor." And in the whole long story, not a word about Gervais.

I guess if you offend the stars and the studios, you will be cut off from all the staged interviews, manufactured leaks and even press releases.

And one more thing: The headline says "snarky", and so I think you can safely assume that the hip kids of today have abandoned it completely.

Serious? Snarky? Oscar Courts a Social Medium

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