The real reward for a star is to speak out
There’s nothing quite like a boorish pub chat enthusiast to make you work out in precise and confident detail exactly how you feel about an issue that, beforehand, you’d happily ignored. The subject? Celebrities using their platform to talk about “issues” in this, the climactic finale of awards season, the Oscars 2020.
The ceremony will play out today in a confection of memes, breathless red-carpet commentary and several million eyerolls when a winning member of the Hollywood elite uses their acceptance speech to make a political point.
In another life, I too might have barfed at the idea that an actor thinks it possible to make a convincing argument about anything truly significant while picking up an “I am the best” trophy. Who needs Michelle Williams to preach feminism? What can Leonardo DiCaprio really achieve by confirming that the climate crisis is the most urgent threat facing the planet?
But watching Ricky Gervais at the Golden Globes (“accept your little award, thank your agent and God and fuck off”) persuaded me I could only argue for the alternative or, rather, the reality: the rich, famous, beautiful and damned have a reach and power far greater than anyone might be comfortable with. So it’s only right to use it to speak out about political causes.
Critics can snipe that these speeches are often shallow, hypocritical and beset with dubious motives to score points on image and credibility. Yet it is still absolutely true that Joaquin Phoenix at the Baftas highlighting systemic racism gains greater traction than any study designed to illustrate the same point. So why not? In fact, give me more.
Phoenix, a long-standing crush of mine (a crush revived with stupid enthusiasm after he’d pointed out the bare basics) stuck it to the industry for not doing more to combat racial inequity. A level of cynicism is fine – after all, seasoned Obama aides and Clinton strategists confirmed last week that they worked with plenty of the A-list on their awards speeches.
But it’s also worth being realistic about the world we inhabit: you may think you’re not susceptible to the rallying calls of Hollywood stars, but the very fact those stars are engaging with tricky subjects means that those subjects have reached a tipping point. A change in mainstream thinking can only be round the corner, one hopes.
Code-switching can damage your health
What do you lose when you learn a new language of social codes and adapt your speech, appearance and behaviour in order to assimilate in the workplace and get ahead? When, essentially, you “code-switch”? The Harvard Business Review recently tallied the psychological cost to black Americans who can’t “be” in the workplace but have to adapt to a culture that otherwise dictates they are too much, too different, too black otherwise.
Plenty of us code-switch so naturally we’re barely aware we do it any more, but the results of the research are no less fascinating. Burnout. Exhaustion. Reduced workplace performance. If the moral case doesn’t push organisations to do better, the authors recommend that, naturally, the business case at least should.
Working out how to get another hit
I get that pop stardom is tricksy and you have to be nimble to stay in the game. Expand the brand by launching a perfume. Make the pivot to podcasting. But my gym has just hosted a high-intensity interval training class taught by Ella Eyre, an actual, major label, Brit-award-winning pop star, to help her launch her new single.
Just, what?! Why not go for an appearance on breakfast TV? Or put on a gig? Who on Ella Eyre’s team convinced her that she needs to teach HIIT to have a hit?
