Mailbag for January 26, 2024
An awkward Oscar Nominees Luncheon, why the Oscar prestige, SNL snatching legend Donna Richards, the most famous person in the world, Hollywood's hair club for men, what happened to May December
Dear Squawkers,
One of the big stories this week in entertainment was the Oscar nominations and, of course, who was snubbed. So I’ve been thinking about the Oscar Nominees Luncheon, which is happening this year on February 12, ten days before Oscar voting begins. Which means that, yes, there is active campaigning going on during that period…even though, ostensibly, it’s an afternoon of just straight celebration, all of the nominees gathered together, along with some members of the press and also Academy governors, in what’s supposed to be a non-competitive space, just appreciating each other, and posing for a class photo.
The reason I’ve been thinking about the luncheon is because, typically, the people who are snubbed don’t get to go. It’s a luncheon for those who have been nominated – and if you are snubbed, you are obviously NOT nominated, and therefore not invited. This year, however, well, both Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie will be invited as nominees for writing and producing Barbie, which has been nominated for Best Picture. But they are also considered snubs because they were not nominated for Best Director and Best Actress. It’s not like it’s never happened before, but it’s just interesting considering the amount of noise that Greta and Margot’s snubs have generated, with almost all the major publications that cover the industry publishing articles about their omissions in particular, and members of the Oscar Academy rushing to certain outlets to express their disappointment, like this one at PEOPLE.com.
I’m not saying that the luncheon is going to be awkward, my point is that, well, it’s not like no one will be thinking about it in that room, given that Greta and Margot will both actually be there. What’s also interesting is that if the discourse about Greta and Margot continues, will that have an impact on the actual Oscar votes?
Over a decade ago, Ben Affleck was snubbed in the Best Director category for Argo – and Argo went on to win Best Picture. Looking back, Ben’s snub probably helped Argo win the big prize, taking out Stephen Spielberg’s Lincoln and Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty. There were several factors for Argo’s come-from-behind charge, and it wasn’t just about Ben’s snub, but the snub was definitely a factor because it became an unofficial campaign narrative through the most critical phase of the Oscar voting process. Do you think the people running the Oppenheimer campaign are nervous about whether or not that might happen with Barbie? Or are they all, nah, it’s a pink girly movie, and not a political thriller like Argo, no problem?
Something to think about as we get ever closer to the awards. The SAGs are a month away now and when Argo won the SAG for best ensemble, the SAG equivalent of Best Picture, that’s when people really started believing that it would go alllll the way to the final award at the Oscars.
Next, mailbag time.
Question from Ketri: Sarah’s intro [from Wednesday] has me thinking about the public nature of the Oscars. In another universe, the Oscars could be an industry event, not televised, not as subject to public discourse and the annual backlash Sarah talked about. What made the Oscars become the public spectacle that it is? I assume it was tied to promoting films but I’d be interested to know know more about this side of its history.
Lainey’s Answer:
The answer, at least in my opinion, is television. The first Oscar ceremony to be broadcast on television was in 1953, hosted by Bob Hope. At the time, though, film was prestige and television was considered trash. The people involved in film, like the studios, the executives, the actors, etc, all thought TV was beneath them. But before the Oscars started airing on television, it was the studios that paid for the event. So it all comes down to money – because NBC came in and offered to foot the bill for the television rights and the studios were like, oh look, we can save money, and all we have to do is get in bed for the night with the low classy people who do television and we can use the medium of television, which we don’t respect at all, to promote our movies.
You can imagine the intrigue for the audience back then, right? This was Bob Hope, one of America’s most beloved entertainers, if not THE most beloved entertainer in his prime. But also, the public had little access to movie stars in that era. To see them they’d have to leave their homes to go to the movies. And once in a while they could buy a magazine with the stars on the cover. But it wasn’t like it is now with so many multimedia options there’s always a celebrity staring back at you even when you don’t go looking for them.
In 1953, being able to watch celebrities all dressed up from the comfort of their homes was radical for viewers. Over 30 million people tuned in that year; that number went up to 40 or so million the next year. And nobody looked back. For a long time, Oscar gold meant box office gold. And having the Oscars on television made television more popular. It was a win-win.
This year marks the 96th Oscars. That is… a long time. It really is the most recognisable award in the world. Everyone knows what an Oscar is – even those on TikTok and SnapChat, lol – and everyone knows what an Oscar LOOKS like. There is no other award globally that has the familiarity of Oscar. You see an Oscar, you immediately know what it stands for. That is no small thing. And, for the most part, it has remained prestigious. That’s one of the reasons why the Academy is so obsessed with tradition: to preserve the prestige of the award. The downside of this, of course, is that tradition has often impeded progress. The upside is that, even though the Oscars have been criticised, even though every year people are mad as fuck about one thing or the other, it is the award that everyone wants to win. It is the award that is held up as the gold standard of winning, period. Colloquially the term “Oscar” is used to refer to something as the “best”, which means Oscar has deeply entrenched itself in the culture to mean the highest, most elite, top of the mountain, the ultimate.
My final point on this that Hollywood continues to assign top value to the Oscar. These are people we follow, we talk incessantly about, people who we, the public, have made stars. And these stars all covet Oscar. They’re the ones who uphold the significance of the award to the point, sometimes, of desperation. No other entertainment award inspires this kind of thirst. The Grammys, for example, are supposed to be the Oscars of music but, like, there are musicians who campaign harder for the Oscar than they ever do for the Grammy. See Lady Gaga. They’d never say this out loud but winning a Grammy is a lot easier than winning an Oscar and that high degree of difficulty also contributes to perception of Oscar as the end-all-and-be-all in the industry. When we can see, literally, how fucking bad they want it, it IS a public spectacle.
Question from Shay: Hi Sarah and Lainey, as an avid SNL watcher, who is the person who snatches the guest host after the sketch? If the cameras continue to roll as the sketch comes to a close, going to commercial, this person with blonde hair rushes in grabbing the host by the hand whisking them away. Is this the 'showrunner'? I think the name fits the job 😄
Lainey’s Answer:
Donna Richards! This woman is a f-cking legend for SNL obsessives like me because, as you said, the way she “snatches” the guest host and goes flying to parts unknown as soon as a sketch is over is part of the weekly entertainment.
Donna is a member of the Wardrobe Department. She’s the “host dresser”. It is her job to get the host from set to the dressing room to change into the next costume in time for the next sketch. Those who are unfamiliar with how SNL works might think it’s a little dramatic, the way she grabs the host’s hand and books it out of there, but that’s actually what is required – they have NO time, the costumes (including wigs and makeup etc) are often SO elaborate, you need a person with laser vision who’s also super organised and knows her shit inside and out.
I always appreciated this intellectually, but I REALLY appreciated it when I went to SNL for the first time last April. My friend Blair applied for tickets and was selected for the Molly Shannon episode, dress rehearsal. Which, for us, was the best option, since both of us work in live television, dress is the most inside baseball that it can get for people in our profession. Dress is where they don’t cut sketches, they run through everything they have, and it’s also where they are testing their material out for the first time so you really get to see them show their work, in progress.
Anyway, to go back to Donna Richards, for almost three hours, I got to see her in action – like on a wide shot. And this is important because the SNL studio isn’t all that big, and the studio is divided into multiple sets. Like you know the stage, which is one set, but there are two other sets on either side of the stage. And the sets change by the skits, right? So once one sketch is over, the crew is immediately striking (taking apart) one set and loading in the next set that that space will be used for. In that studio then, you have the cameras and their operators, the producers, the crew responsible for bringing the set pieces in, and various other production staff IN ADDITION to the cast. It is FUCKING CRAMMED in there.
So what Donna has to do is find a lane amidst all that activity and navigate the host through that mess. And all of this is planned ahead of time. She doesn’t just show up on the day and haphazardly run into whatever open gap is there – they choreograph the route in advance, and she’s responsible for taking the host along that narrow route. Because you’re not going to tell the host to figure out the escape route on top of what the host already has to do. And, again, you need to get the host from A to B on time, with not a second to spare. It’s an intricate dance, and Donna does this twice, every week that SNL goes to air. One time, as she shared a few years ago, she actually carried Jennifer Lopez on her back because JLo couldn’t move quickly enough. If you haven’t already, you should watch the mini-doc that SNL produced about the Wardrobe Department and how they keep it moving. It really underscores how important they are to the production and WHY Donna has to hustle the way she does.
Those quick changes are no fucking joke. I know this because I worked in live television for ten years on The Social. And a couple of times a month I had three minutes to get out of my show clothes – which often involved layers, because that’s how I dress – into a fitness outfit if we were doing a workout segment. That means zippers and buttons and whatever the f-ck complicated shit I might be wearing, into leggings and some kind of sports top, while preserving the hair and the makeup AND after all that, the audio department had to come in to reattach my mic pack and my earpiece. It was goddamn stress every time. But imagine doing that like TEN times in one show?! That’s Donna! Donna makes it happen!
Question from Fernanda: I ask this question kind of often and get a lot of interesting answers, so I'd love to hear your perspective! Who do you think is the most famous person in the world? (I live in Brazil, so I'm curious about if/how geography will affect the answer!)
Sarah’s answer:
The Pope and the US president. Hand’s down.
But on the more typical celebrity side, who’s the hottest soccer player? David Beckham, Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi. Biggest pop stars? I’m not convinced even Taylor Swift has the global recognition of BTS. Just ask yourself—what is the most widely known form of entertainment, and then follow-up, who is the biggest at that thing? Soccer and music are always universally popular, so the superstars in those arenas are going to be hugely famous all over the world.
Beyond that, what are the most spoken languages in the world? Mandarin Chinese is #1, which is why Andy Lau is more famous than Tom Cruise. But speaking of Tom Cruise, he probably is the most famous American movie star. Dedicating the last 20 years of his career to making the kind of accessible action movies that play in any language was smart. Oh, but you know who else is more famous than him? Shah Rukh Khan. Holy SHIT, he’s famous. But again, it’s a numbers game. India’s population is more than one billion people larger than the US. Cultural hegemony is real, but it can also be a trick of the light when it comes to things like celebrity.
Question from Denise: How does the LG team decide what content is shared here versus what's on the site? How do you decide which stories to cover each day, and which member of the LG staff covers them? I'm interested in all the inside baseball!
Lainey’s Answer:
The introduction to today’s mailbag? About the Oscar Nominees Luncheon? I was considering writing that for Thursday’s site open, and then I decided to save it instead for the mailbag open, because it isn’t like… today’s news. So that’s the most basic criteria for how Sarah and I decide between LaineyGossip and The Squawk. The freshest stories will always be at LaineyGossip and we can expand on those conversations here at The Squawk, but we always want LG to be the destination for when something breaks or when something is first released.
Like trailers – that’s Sarah’s domain and, for the most part, when a trailer drops, it’s an unwritten rule that she will cover it. Once in a while, I’ll care more about a particular movie, or I’ll have a personal connection to it that means the post is better suited to me. In general, though, trailers are Sarah’s business and I do not touch.
I work off a loose outline on the days I’m editing, depending on what’s out there and what photos are available. For example, I’m writing this on Thursday night, and for Friday’s LG content, I currently have the following planned:
-The Swans red carpet
-Bradley Cooper and Gigi Hadid
-Olivia Wilde
And I’ve asked Sarah if she wants to write the new Sydney Sweeney trailer – she just emailed back and said “yes!” I also need to get to Nicole Kidman’s new cover story in Australian Vogue but that’s not locked in because I kinda want to watch her new series, Expats, first. I’ll figure it out in the morning, depending on what new photos we get.
Stephanie usually sends her pitches to us around 8 or 9pm and Sarah often makes the call on those, and we will both, when necessary, jump in with an edit note with how we would suggest that Steph should approach the story. Sarah’s the one who does the final edit on Steph’s pieces and if it’s my day to edit, I’ll line it up depending on where I think the story fits with the other posts on the day.
On Sarah’s edit days, I’ll let her know the night before which stories I’m interested in and she’ll figure out how she wants to line it up. I am, however, notorious for changing my mind on what I’ve pitched which is probably so annoying for her. But that’s also how it is when I’m editing. That lineup I just shared with you might not happen at all tomorrow, I don’t know yet!
“Dear Gossips”, however, remains my biggest struggle on some days. If I can get the open sorted, the rest of the day is smooth. But if I’m struggling to find something to write in the open, the rest of the day is catchup and trying to make up for the time I lost just sitting there thinking of what to say in the open.
Sarah’s answer:
Lainey does change her mind often, but it’s not annoying, I just send a note to Emily, our site manager, who does all the photo selections and posting (or Jacek, if he’s covering for Em). It’s probably harder on Em! But that’s the key—communication. We’re in touch constantly throughout the week about headlines, pitches, photos, the lineup, coverage. And then on the day, it’s a constant back and forth of finished pieces ready for publishing, any last-minute changes, etc. An “easy” day editing the site usually involves around 20-30 emails with Emily and Lainey, a heavy day can run 40+ emails. And Lainey is right, coming up with the intro is the worst part. Sometimes it’s easy, but when it’s hard, it’s HARD.
Also, you should ask how the site comes together the day after the Oscars. After the first time I participated in that, the come down was like a bad caffeine crash, and I’m not even there. Lainey is there!
Question from Phyl: Given how many women (all?) wear extra hair pieces or wigs, is it safe to assume that most of the men do too? They can’t all have that Zayn Malik lushness.
Lainey’s Answer: It is indeed safe to assume that men wear hairpieces, too – though maybe not as many men to women. They certainly wear them in movies. Like the first name that pops to mind is Robert Pattinson and the wig he wore in Twilight. Is this general knowledge? Or do most people assume that RP’s Twilight hair was his own hair? Another person who comes to mind is Al Pacino. Go back and look at some of his pictures, there was often a very obvious wig/toupee in play that sometimes wasn’t the right colour.
If it’s not wigs or hairpieces, it’s spray. John Travolta used to do this – use spray to fill in the spots where his hair wasn’t thick enough. I’ve heard stories about Justin Theroux doing it, too.
Even if there aren’t hairpieces or spray being used, there are treatments happening. Joel McHale was pretty open about having three hair transplant surgeries. There’s a Reddit thread here about this. I don’t think he’s ever talked about it, but Matthew McConaughey’s hair is looking a lot fuller these days. Here he is in 2013:
And this is Matthew ten years later, just a few months ago, September 2023:
Seriously the technology is amazing. It’s probably expensive but whatever it is that’s happening here is pretty fucking incredible.
Sarah’s answer:
Another one that leaps to mind is my beloved Timothy Olyphant. He definitely did something to his hairline, probably plugs or a transplant. Here he is in "The Broken Hearts Club" in 2000:
The hairline is already wonky. And here he is last February, in his mid-fifties:
His hair is, and has been for the last couple decades, noticeably fuller than it was in his 20s. Hairlines don’t bounce back! That shit is genetic!
Also, shoutout to comedian Matteo Lane, whose special is titled Hair Plugs & Heartache. A significant portion of his set is dedicated to talking about getting his hair plugs. Truly, whatever makes you feel good!
Question from KC: Hi Sarah! Can you give a low down on what you think happened with May December?
Sarah’s answer:
If you mean its near shutout at the Oscars, it was a confluence of events. Chiefly, director Todd Haynes is vastly underappreciated by his peers. He’s only been personally nominated for one Oscar, in 2002 for writing Far From Heaven, and though some of his films have garnered nominations, particularly for actors, Carol was considered a huge snub when it missed nominations for Best Director and Best Picture at the 2016 Oscars.
With May December, there is the weird slant against Haynes, compounded by Vili Fualaau coming out against the film—anyone on the fence was given a reason to not nominate it. And then there’s the subject: the film is as much about the emotional vampirism of actors and filmmaking as it is sexual predation. I mean, there’s a scene where Natalie Portman’s character says the auditioning 12-year-old actors “aren’t sexy enough”! I’m actually amazed the screenplay got nominated. It says a lot about how much filmmakers undervalue writing that they’re not holding Samy Burch and Alex Mechnanik as responsible for that line as they are Todd Haynes. As for Charles Melton, he was on the bubble, and it didn’t break his way. The Oscars love young actresses, but they’re a lot harder on young actors. And Vili Fualaau criticizing the film really didn’t help.
Question from Myra: Rachel McAdams is Gen X!! I know because we have the same birth year lol. We're somewhat on the cusp...Xennial if you believe in that sh$$. She was in her mid-20s when Mean Girls came out in 2004 though, so I can see why she's associated with Millennials. All the other Plastics are Millennials.
Lainey’s Answer:
So a few people were yelling at me about this after I posted about Rachel on Monday and called her a Millennial. I immediately went to Duana to laugh about this because she considers herself a Millennial and she’s a year older than Rachel and she always refers to them as the same generation. Duana responded to this by saying the micro generation disappeared. And that:
“[Rachel’s] kids are younggggg. She’s millennial. They’re not fixed boundaries!”
Then she ended on what I consider a mic drop, as only Duana can do:
“Like are Rachel McAdams and I the same generation as Troy Dyer and Lelaina Pierce?”
I rest her case. But I’m sure you’ll keep yelling about it in the comments. And we want you to. That’s what we do here, we squawk! Thanks for squawking! Thanks for reading! Thanks for the group hug while shouting in our faces!
Keep squawking, keep gossiping,
Lainey and Sarah
I am going to disagree with Duana--Rachel McAdams is Gen X. Which means so is Duana! If you want to be really specific I think they fall into the category of Xennial/Lucky Ones/Oregon Trail generation. They're on the cusp between Gen X and Millennials.
There is an actual math equation for this. If you were 20 before the turn of the millennium you're not a Millennial. That generation is called "Millennial" because they (we) came of age at the millennium.
Update: per what I said in my answer about how we map out LaineyGossip every day - only one of the planned posts from last night has made it to the site today: the Swans. I just finished writing it and it should be posted by 1pm ET. This is what I mean about constantly changing my mind and/or having to reshuffle things depending on what's out there on any given day.