Enough With the Pizza Already: Reactions to the 2014 Academy Awards

(Screen shot from http://youtu.be/HN9XQ4OofCY)

I never thought I’d utter any words that would in any way act as an imperative to curtail anything dealing with pizza. (And technically I didn’t utter them. I texted them to a dear friend as we fulfilled our yearly ritual of exchanging snarky remarks about Anne Hathaway’s dresses and gushing praises about Cate Blanchett’s skin during the 2014 Academy Awards ceremony.) But at any rate, that’s how I felt after watching Ellen do the same pizza gag for three hours. When she started collecting money in a hat to pay for the pizza, that was it: Enough with the pizza already!

The purpose of the gag may just have been to further support the overall down-to-earth feeling that Ellen created in hosting the show. Or, it may have been a thoughtfully crafted metanarrative on watching awards shows, designed to make the front-row celebrity gods and goddesses in the Kodak Theater/Dolby Theater/whatever the heck that thing is being called now seem human. When these celebrities started eating pizza, they were mimicking us humans who gather around Papa John’s and watch the Oscars. On Sunday night, we were all (or we wished we were all) eating pizza and watching people who were eating pizza and watching the Oscars.

The problem with creating a “they’re-just-like-us!” narrative, though, is that celebrities are not just like us. We may have been eating pizza and watching the Oscars, but we weren’t doing it in Dior and we weren’t doing it while dripping in Harry Winston’s finest. We weren’t using $20,000 Armani gowns like napkins for pizza grease. And it is this blatant disregard for their attire that separates these celebrities even further from you and me. It’s one thing to wear/rent/buy a gown that costs thousands of dollars. It’s another to risk dripping oil on it, and undoubtedly, that stuff was going to drip oil. It speaks of an attitude that unfortunately seems far too prevalent within the celebrity culture, or at least a part of it that we are privy to through the Kardashians — an attitude that believes money can just fix whatever is broken, or says that “someone else can take care of it.”

I am not like celebrities, and they are not like me. And isn’t that one of the reasons we watch this stuff anyway? We watch it to see what it’s like on the other side of things, where money is no object. Next year, I hope that there will be no more celebrities eating pizza during the ceremony (leave the pizza for me, please!), and I also hope that #tinaandamyforoscars2015 will become a reality.

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Laura Creel (@Little_Utopia) is the managing editor of Little Utopia.