celebrity gossip, academic style

1.) What is your name, occupation, website (if applicable)?
Melanie Haupt, PhD candidate in English at UT-Austin, where I teach Women’s Popular Genres (read: Twilight in the college classroom!). I’m also a freelance writer for the Austin Chronicle (archive here). I keep a food-and-family blog here. (Annie’s note: Melanie also wrote the profile of this blog for the Austin Chronicle, which is how we became fast social media friends).

2.) What is your first memory of being drawn to a star or celebrity?
I have two discrete memories of being drawn to a star or celebrity. The first is an early obsession with Laura Ingalls Wilder. I am pretty sure that the Little House books were the first series that I gobbled up and reread multiple times. Back then, I didn’t really understand Ma’s racism or the fact that Almanzo was much, much older than Laura (creepy!). I just really loved the evocative way in which Wilder wrote of pioneering life. This love of the books extended to an obsessive love of the TV show, which I watched religiously every week until it ended in 1982. I even watched “A New Beginning” when it started, but lost interest quickly. (I should note now that I absolutely don’t find pioneers or pioneering even remotely romantic; in fact, I find it kind of gross.)

The other memory I have is of being totally and completely obsessed with Olivia Newton-John (this is in the very early ’80s, right after Grease). Physical was the very first album I ever bought — with my very own money, I might add. Dudes, I was NINE. And I was listening to my hero sing, “Let’s get animal/animal/I wanna get animal”?! WHUT. Of course, I had no idea what any of it meant. And I remember being very shocked and confused when I heard her speaking voice (and Australian accent). I think my mom was amused by having to explain to me why my beloved Olivia talked so funny.

3.) Who are your heroes of contemporary celebritude, and why?

Oh, gosh, that’s a tough one. At 38 and as a mother of two, I don’t really have the mental space to have celebrity heroes, but if I had to pick one right off the top of my head, it would have to be Annette Bening. I don’t think she’s a very good actress, and I thought that her performance in The Kids Are All Right was beyond shrill (and don’t get me started on how that movie is SO NOT PROGRESSIVE), but I admire the fact that her face looks like a 50-something woman’s face and that she has managed to keep her private life private (once the initial splash of her marriage to Warren Beatty subsided).

Oh, and Kathryn Bigelow, who not only spells “Kathryn” correctly (that’s my middle name), but is one bad-ass filmmaker. The Hurt Locker rocked my world, and I think it’s a story that could only have been told by a woman.

By the way, I feel like I’m really aging myself here.

4.) Who are your favorite participants, broadly speaking, in the history of stardom, and why?
Elizabeth Taylor, because she just did her thing, man, and no-one was going to stop her.
Audrey Hepburn, such a classy lady. I think of her as just that, a lady, graceful and glamorous and good.

5.) You can only be best friends with one person in all of celebritude, past and present. Who? How did you two meet? What’s your favorite thing to do together?
Michelle Williams and I met browsing in the classics section at BookPeople, and our favorite thing to do together is drink wine and eat moules frites at Vino Vino and talk about great books and our kids, and sometimes movies. Sometimes I ask her for the real dirt on celebrities she’s worked with, but I don’t want to exploit that part of our friendship. But mostly we talk about our kids because that’s what moms do. Sometimes, after we’ve killed a bottle or two, she talks about Heath Ledger and we both cry.

6.) You can only date one person in all of celebritude, past and present. Who? Where would your first date be? What would he/she get you for your birthday?
If you’d asked me this 10 years ago, I would have said Russell Crowe, and my answer about what our first date would look like would be too filthy to publish.

These days I’d say Jeremy Renner, even though I’m pretty sure I’m taller than he is, and our first date would be at a really awesome sushi place in Boulder that I love. He would drink sake and I would drink pinot grigio and we would get one of those giant boats of sushi and just eat and talk for hours. And then we would walk up and down the Pearl Street Mall and talk and talk until it’s time to chastely say goodnight. For my birthday, he would get me a new iPod loaded with a bunch of mixes he hand-picked for me (and they’re all perfect because he just knows what I like). That and some roses.

7.) Who do you regard as the lowest depth of celebritude?
Anyone who has ever been a castmember of the Real Housewives franchise. Elisabeth Hasselbeck. Speidi. The Kardashians. Fucking Snooki and her crew.

8.) Name a celebrity that is
a.) Overrated: Sorry, Annie, but that is Angelina Jolie. You can only ride the allure of steak lips so far. Oh, and Zooey Deschanel. You can only ride big ole blue pixie eyes so far.
b.) Underrated: Jeremy Renner. Until he is nominated for and wins Master Of The Universe, he is underrated.
c.) Appropriately rated: Joseph Gordon Levitt, I guess?

9.) What is your favorite celebrity nickname and/or celebrity culture-related slang? (e.g. “Manslinger” for Kate Hudson)
I really love all of those couple portmanteaus, like Bennifer and Swiftenhaal. If there is one for Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard, that is automatically my favorite.

10.) What is the greatest/most bombastic moment of celebrity ever? (Example: A-Rod posing for a photo shoot as a centaur)
File under bombastic: Kanye West’s infamous “I’ma let you finish, but….”

11.) Where do you get gossip on your celebrities of interest? Explain more?
I really hate to say this, but I get most of my celebrity gossip from Jezebel and Gawker. I am too busy frittering away my internet time on food blogs. Oh, and Entertainment Weekly. Does that count as gossip, tho?

12.) How do celebrities and stardom relate to your own work/extra-work activites?
Well, I think any cultural critic worth her salt is conversant in the ways of celebrities and stardom. I find that my students really like to talk about star images and how they relate to what they see in the movies and on TV. (I’m thinking in terms of Kristin Stewart/Bella.) Also, I am a notorious sticky-beak and just love to know what everybody’s doing. (Except for Snooki. That trash can just go away now.) Which means that I devour every issue of Entertainment Weekly while on the elliptical.

13.) Why is celebrity culture — and our attention, analysis, and discussion of it — important?

Well, I think celebrity culture is a reflection of our cultural moment, no? I totally agree with you when you say that we work out things that are difficult to talk about via talking about celebrities and their images. That said, I find it kind of tiresome to see celebrities mucking about in world affairs. I don’t really care what Ashton Kutcher has to say (or Tweet, if you will) about Egypt, you know?

1. What is your name, occupation, website (if applicable)?

Matt Thomas, PhD candidate in American Studies at the University of Iowa. I blog at http://submittedforyourperusal.com and tweet http://twitter.com/mattthomas.

2. What is your first memory of being drawn to a star or celebrity?

I wasn’t really into in any celebrities until I was a teenager, at which point I would clip magazine photos of, save newspaper articles about, and read books on the people who fascinated me. This was before the Internet, when researching your favorite celebrity required legwork. I got my celebrity news at the public library. As a kid, however, I was more into characters than celebrities. My first real introduction to celebrity was likely the moment I realized that Harrison Ford played both Han Solo and Indiana Jones. Also, as a kid I got told I looked like Fred Savage a lot, so I paid extra attention to Savage’s late-’80s oeuvre: The Boy Who Could Fly, The Princess Bride, Little Monsters, The Wizard, and The Wonder Years. Here was a kid, only a few years older than me, who was famous, who had a book called Fred Savage: Totally Awesome written about him. I wasn’t famous. No one had written a book about me. Not only did celebrities exist, I realized, but they were different from regular people.

3. Who are your heroes of contemporary celebritude, and why?

I admire celebrities who shun, in whole or in part, the limelight, yet despite this fact, or some cases because of it, they’re able to maintain their fame. I’m thinking here of people like Greta Garbo, Jackie Onassis, Thomas Pynchon (of whom not even a recent photo exists), and Stanley Kubrick. Even someone like Jack Nicholson, who’s seen regularly at Lakers games, but who seldom gives interviews, and hasn’t appeared on a late-night talk show since 1971, qualifies. As does anyone whose career is marked by gaps and elisions, but the moment they poke their head out from behind the curtain, the spotlight swivels their way, and the public greets them as if they had never left.

The best example I can think of here – though he probably doesn’t fit everyone’s definition of “celebrity” – is Terrence Malick, who took twenty years off between Days of Heaven (1978) and The Thin Red Line (1998), but as soon as he stepped back on the scene, every male star in Hollywood wanted to work with him. Celebrity is incredibly seductive, and it can consume, even destroy, people. Think Norma Desmond or Michael Jackson. I admire people who resist getting too caught up in it, people who focus instead on doing and making stuff that seduces the rest of us. That’s not only harder than it looks, but it requires a certain amount of courage, I think.

4. You can only be best friends with one person in all of celebritude, past and present. Who? How did you two meet? What’s your favorite thing to do together?

I’d want to be friends with Peter Bogdonivich so he could teach me how to ingratiate myself with Hollywood’s masters. I realize this is like asking the genie for unlimited wishes with my one wish, but I’ve always envied Bogdonivich’s ability to effortlessly strike up lifelong friendships with people he admired (e.g., Orson Welles) and would love to learn his secrets. We meet when I interview him. Our favorite thing to do together is watch movies.

5. You can only date one person in all of celebritude, past and present. Who? Where would your first date be? What would he/she get you for your birthday?

Elizabeth Taylor. I can’t tell you what we’d do. For my birthday, she’d pay for a vacation for just the two of us. Someplace hot. For her birthday, I’d buy her diamonds.

6. Who do you regard as the lowest depth of celebritude?

Anyone who clings desperately to the spotlight à la Heidi and Spencer. Again, see my answer to question three.

7. Name a celebrity that is:

a) Overrated: Lady Gaga

b) Underrated: Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta

c) Appropriately rated: Madonna

9. What is your favorite celebrity nickname and/or celebrity culture-related slang? (e.g., “Manslinger” for Kate Hudson)

“The Situation” is pretty good, and I’ve always found gossip-mag portmanteaus like “Bennifer” and “Brangelina” amusing.

10. What is the greatest/most bombastic moment of celebrity ever? (Example: A-Rod posing for a photo shoot as a centaur)

Prince changing his name to an unpronounceable symbol in 1993.

11. Where do you get gossip on your celebrities of interest? Explain more?

Mostly Twitter and entertainment news shows like Entertainment Tonight, Access Hollywood, Extra, TMZ, The Insider, and E! News, all of which, I’m semi-ashamed to say, I stop and watch when I stumble across them whilst channel-surfing. Now, if you had asked me this question a few years ago, I would have said gossip blogs like Perez Hilton, The Superficial, TMZ, et al., but I rarely go to any of those sites today, mostly because I feel like it’s too easy to spend the whole afternoon reading them, but also because Twitter does a pretty good job of keeping me abreast of celebrity news, even though I mainly follow academics. Magazines like People and Us Weekly have never been my thing.

12. How do celebrities and stardom relate to your own work/extra-work activities?

Professionally, and I suppose personally as well, I’m interested in American popular culture, particularly Hollywood cinema, of which celebrities are an inextricable part. Personally, and I suppose professionally as well, I’m interested in capturing and holding people’s attention, and celebrities offer clues about how to do that.

13. What is celebrity culture – and our attention, analysis, and discussion of it – important?

Not to get too grandiose, but celebrities symbolize the nation in psychodramatic form. To quote my former teacher Leo Braudy, author of The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History, “Modern fame is always compounded of audience’s aspirations and its despair, its need to admire and to find a scapegoat for that need. To dismiss the circus of contemporary notoriety with pat versions of Daniel Boorstin’s phrase, ‘a celebrity is someone who is famous for being famous,’ too easily allows us to ignore the importance of even celebrity in shaping the values of our society, not always for the worse.”

This questionnaire comes from Katie Feo Kelly, who I’ve known since my second semester of my Ph.D., probably has better hair than you, and is currently writing a dissertation on the trend towards organization (and the commodification thereof: think California Closets, The Container Store, Real Simple). She’s also in my dissertation reading group, a sharp editor, and a HUGE FAN OF THE CAPSLOCK JUST LIKE ME!

1.) What is your name, occupation, website (if applicable)?
Katherine Feo Kelly, grad student, The University of Texas at Austin. Occasional tidbits @katiefeokelly on Twitter.

2.) What is your first memory of being drawn to a star or celebrity?

Macaulay Culkin, circa Home Alone. He was a kid inspiration! I had, then only slightly more than now, a hard time distinguishing between the ingenious 10-year old who could foil robbers, and the boy who played the ingenious 10-year old in the movie. What a guy!

3.) Who are your heroes of contemporary celebritude, and why?

When I lived in England I read all of the Katie Price/Jordan autobiographies and celebrated her as the greatest celebrity of all time.

The Greatest Celebrity of our Time!

I think at the time I felt like if I could really know British celebrity culture and the UK’s weird B-list celebrities as well as I did American ones, I’d be fully immersed in the culture (someone is going to read this and find me very sad). It took me the whole three years I was there to accomplish this, but I finally learned all the names, backstories and cultural references (so many girl/boy bands!). Since then I’ve tried to keep up with only moderate success. And in the meantime, I’ve not really found anyone who can match Price’s guilelessness/absurdity/good humor/pathos, but even so she’s sort of dwindled in my consciousness as a celebrity to watch.

4.) Who are your favorite participants, broadly speaking, in the history of stardom, and why?

I am essentially ignorant of the history of stardom before Matt Damon. Good Will Hunting was the first time (fine, since Home Alone) that I was interested in following a celebrity’s personal life, and basically since then it’s provided the North Star for my interest in celebrities, aka the Damon-principle, aka who-is-my-celebrity-crush?, aka please give me a reason to be interested in you. Therefore, I have done very little research or thinking about celebrity before the era of my own adolescence. I am sure there is much to say about Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, but I am not the one to say it.

5.) You can only be best friends with one person in all of celebritude, past and present. Who? How did you two meet? What’s your favorite thing to do together?

My actual best friend works in the film industry and went to a screening of Black Swan and said that Mila Kunis seemed like a normal, fun girl you might actually, in real life, want to be friends with. So, since I trust my actual best friend in all things, especially her taste in best friends, I will choose Mila Kunis. We met through a mutual friend, obviously.

6.) You can only date on person in all of celebritude, past and present. Who? Where would you first date be? What would he/she get you for your birthday?

Dating a celebrity sounds like a tiresome and potentially psychologically damaging scenario. But, like most people, I do have a few that rotate in and out of my favor. I generally only care about one at any given time, but I have allowed myself some slack by opening a new category (“British”) so as to eliminate unfair competition.

7.) Who do you regard as the lowest depth of celebritude?

Any and all of the Housewives. There are many times when I’m a little startled by theextremes of American culture (Hollywood churns out people that seem to exist in a different world than the rest country/universe). The celebritude of the Housewives seems especially insulting, though, because they are “real” people who are celebrities only because they live insanely out-of-touch lives in and around the rest of us. I mean, I get the fascination: we watch them act like we’re watching them because there is something legitimately interesting, talented, etc. about them. I guess it’s consistent with a political scenario that favors the fabulously rich at the expense of the majority of the rest of the country, but I still find it totally odious from an entertainment perspective.

8.) Name a celebrity that is
a.) Overrated: Easiest answer ever: Anne Hathaway.
b.) Underrated: Is there such a thing? All attention seems a blessing in this industry, but OK. Though I do have another question: does this mean that their talent is underrated, or their celebrity? Talent and celebrity seem like different, only kinda-related things. I was watching Southland the other night and remarking to myself that I could watch Regina King do anything, anywhere. Is her talent underrated? Not sure- she’s top billing in that show, but then there don’t seem to be a glut of roles for African American women around, so who knows if she could do even more? And does this mean her celebrity underrated? Perhaps for the level of quality acting that she delivers, less celebrity means more credibility, and so it’s fine that she’s not always in the public eye. OR does it hurt her career? I mean, a good number of actresses seem to leverage celebrity for work, right? There are just so many untalented celebrities that the two traits almost seem antithetical, but that’s not always the case, is it? I wonder what Regina King would say about this.
c.) Appropriately rated: Jennifer Aniston-I actually think she’s a good comedienne, but also fairly bland, therefore just appealing enough to most audiences. If she receives professional criticism, it generally seems warranted (I mean, her movies aren’t that great). She seems to provide just enough gossip to stay in the public eye, but not so much scandal as to be dragged down into the mud. More importantly, she puts good work into being a celebrity, so I’d like to give her credit for that. She has celebrity-status hair.

9.) What is your favorite celebrity nickname and/or celebrity culture-related slang?

Any of the winners of “Hot Slut of the Day” on Dlisted. GOOP-y is pretty good, too.

10.) What is the greatest/most bombastic moment of celebrity ever?

I liked when Kayne West said that President Bush hated black people after Katrina. I thought it was weird that he took it back later (who was making him take that back other than President Bush?), but I DID appreciate when Jay Z said that it was problematic that President Bush thought the worst moment of his presidency was Kanye saying he hated black people. Oh yeah, and I also enjoyed John Mayer’s slide out of grace in Playboy or Rolling Stone or where ever it was he gave those insane, drug-addled interviews.

11.) Where do you get gossip on your celebrities of interest? Explain more?

Well you know I love Michael K at Dlisted. Although he often hides behind vulgarity and a cultivated tawdriness, he’s actually very intelligent and “on” with his assessments, and generally hits all the big news (or links to others who do). Also, though he doesn’t pull his punches, when someone is sick or has died he manages to write posts that are funny, respectful and snark-free. It’s a very humane time-out. I appreciate it.

12.) How do celebrities and stardom relate to your own work/extra-work activites?

Ha! Are you kidding? Guess where I’m writing this. Just kidding. Not really.

13.) Why is celebrity culture — and our attention, analysis, and discussion of it — important?
Well, there are the reasons you hit on in your work (as a society, we’re working out our social mores and standards of acceptable behavior, whether good or bad, through the way we interpret and make issue out of the actions of celebrities). But celebrity culture is also, I think, a good way to get a little of the power back. Yeah, we’re saturated by media images and pop culture and it’s hard to get a break from the messages society is ramming down our throats in various cultural outlets (TV, movies, magazines, news sites, the circus, et. al.). But when you read good celebrity gossip-not the sugary, celebratory stuff, but the snarky, intelligent, politically savvy stuff-it’s like you’ve taken the upper hand back, just a little. I’m not arguing for the paparazzi to stalk celebrities because they deserve misery for being celebrities (then again, I’m not exactly crying over it, either), but I do kinda feel like you’ve got to take your lumps along with the good stuff, you know? Take the Oscars-it’s a farce, right? A bunch of the most privileged people in the world celebrating themselves AGAIN at the end of an ENTIRE SEASON OF CELEBRATION. So then I ask you, what’s better than watching the Oscars with scathing commentary? Very little.