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Thread: The Will and Jada freakshow marks the moment celebrity died

  1. #1
    #DeSantis2024 Teh One Who Knocks's Avatar
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    Attention Whore The Will and Jada freakshow marks the moment celebrity died

    By Maureen Callahan - The New York Post




    Celebrity is dead.

    Over the past two weeks, Will and Jada Smith, ostensibly an A-list Hollywood power couple, have made headlines for discussing painfully intimate details of their 20-year marriage — on Jada’s Facebook show.

    This, for better or worse, is what Oprah has wrought. Two middle-aged movie stars, their careers on the decline, offering up what little privacy they once had for public consumption, measured today in clicks, likes, eyeballs and shares. Once upon a time, a waning star might publish a memoir or start a perfume line or guest-star on a nightime soap. Now they unthinkingly hollow out their innards and show us all the gross stuff inside, malignant narcissism included. Whither glamour? Or at least strong-willed publicists?

    Jada, on knowing she was pregnant: “I cried that whole night. I knew my life was never going to be the same.”

    Will: “It was literally like four seconds after we had sex.”

    Have we mentioned that their daughter, Willow, now 17, is seated at the table for this whole conversation?

    Will: “There was a period [where] Mommy woke up and cried 45 days straight.”

    Jada: “You missed some days.”

    On and on they go, talking about Will’s insatiable ego, his insistence that Willow and her 20-year-old brother, Jaden, become child stars, how Jada married Will because she felt pressured into it, how she wept on her way down the aisle, why they no longer consider themselves married but will never get a divorce — huh?! — and Will’s overall brilliance.

    “You know I’m a scientist,” he says at one point. “So everything is science for me.”

    Will Smith never went to college.

    Thirty million people have watched Part 1 of this conversation, and as of Monday, over 4 million watched Part 2. It seems the general takeaway has been the wrong one.

    “Raw and uncut truth,” wrote one commenter.

    “I really love the honesty and blatant conversation,” wrote another.

    Please. The Smiths are hardly the first Hollywood couple to commodify their marriage, but they are the first to use a self-produced online talk show, shot in their Malibu mansion, to swat down rumors of swinging, dabbling in Scientology and infidelity (though they do hint at an open marriage). Sounds like great TV, until you realize the terms of these discussions were clearly pre-set, that Facebook is actually paying Jada for this content, and that she and Will doubtless had final cut.

    Once upon a time, celebrities would offer a few personal nuggets to a magazine or talk show as a way to promote their latest movie or project, then retreat behind their private gates. A famous couple in crisis would sit down with Barbara Walters, but the internet has rendered such gatekeepers unnecessary. Paradoxically, modern celebrity feels more authentic if it’s delivered directly via Instagram or podcast or Facebook — even though these images and utterances are often just as filtered, literally and figuratively.

    “Real talk,” as Jada would say: Willow has no place at this table. She looks like she’s in a hostage situation. How much wisdom could you have to impart if you’d expose your daughter to such crass attention-seeking?

    Lest this sound too cynical, remember: Will and Jada Smith homeschooled their children and treated them, according to a 2015 New York Post story, like creative geniuses deserving of worldwide worship. The result was made clear in an epic Q&A the Smith kids gave to the New York Times Magazine in 2014, Willow fresh off her hit song “Whip My Hair,” Jaden about to drop his new record “Cool Tapes Vol. 2.” You could not make this up.

    Q: What are you reading?

    Willow: “Quantum physics.”

    Jaden: “Ancient texts; things that can’t be pre-dated.”

    Willow went on to say that time doesn’t exist, that we are all living in “a holographic reality that a higher consciousness made,” and that “Whip My Hair” left her feeling like, “Wow, I did so much for black girls and girls around the world.”

    A real Rosa Parks.

    Jaden, meanwhile, said that education was totally unnecessary. “Here’s the deal . . . You never learn anything in school. Think about how many car accidents happen every day. Driver’s ed? What’s up? I still haven’t been to driver’s ed because if everybody I know has been in an accident, I can’t see how driver’s ed is really helping them out.”

    One kid that dumb could be coincidental. Two is just bad parenting.

    Yet Will and Jada Smith are designating themselves #couplegoals — really, it’s self-satisfaction under the guise of relatability — and millions of people are falling for it. The Smiths, in the process, are eroding what little remains of Hollywood glamour.

    Think about it: One of the reasons “A Star Is Born” is resonating is its ode, clear from the title sequence, to the old-school celebrity industrial complex: the anointing of an unknown, the process of her privileged entry and education into stardom, her respect for this hermetically sealed world. There’s hardly any technology in the film, no sense that it’s present-day.

    There’s no acknowledgment that a singer so talented would have been discovered on a reality talent show (Kelly Clarkson) or YouTube (Justin Bieber). She isn’t hounded by TMZ. She has no Google Alert for her name. She doesn’t tweet. And when she suffers the greatest loss of her young life, she keeps her pain to herself until she’s ready, after a time, to turn it into art.

    Imagine that.

  2. #2
    Hal killed Tormund! Pony's Avatar
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    Wow, I'm gonna hurry up and file this away under "Even more shit I don't care about". (Shit I don't care about and More shit I don't care about are already full.)

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  4. #3
    Dilly dilly Goofy's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Pony View Post
    Wow, I'm gonna hurry up and file this away under "Even more shit I don't care about". (Shit I don't care about and More shit I don't care about are already full.)
    Put an entry in there on my behalf too please

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    Shelter Dweller
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    I quite like his films.
    Never seems to be a terrible one.
    Quite like Tom Cruise.

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