OPINION:
In the days and weeks following the Oscars, you’d have been forgiven for thinking the Hollywood star factory had secretly been shut down for re-tooling and opened up as a paperweight emporium.
“Where are all the movie stars” various think pieces howled, pointing at the shuffle of turnip truck rejects and animated laundry baskets that had been paraded before the world as part of Hollywood’s Night of Nights.
Sure, most of these dim and faded copies of the real stars of Hollywood’s golden age – you remember, like Peter Lawford and Jayne Mansfield – had actually appeared in movies, therefore fulfilling the minimum technical requirements for qualifying as “movie stars”. But we all know what was meant.
These youngsters (*cough Zac Efron Jessica Biel cough*) lacked the gravitas, the charisma, the effortless charm of the real deal; what’s the point of movies if they don’t have stars in them
Part of the problem is that it’s a bit tricky getting the stars of today’s big movies to appear on stage to present an award, what with them being a warehouse full of computers.
Yes, since the dawn of movies the big draw as far as getting people into the movies has been technological innovation: in-camera special effects, sound, colour, making Vin Diesel look like he actually wants to kiss a woman. But in contrast to 20 years ago, increasingly the point of movies today is to show the audience amazing things they’ve never seen before. People You can see a bunch of them just by turning on your television.
Oh, that’s right: all the good dramatic work these days is being done on television. You want to be an actor who gets to sink their teeth into a character
The small screen is the place to be seen, and has been for a decade or more. But as for making those television actors into “stars”… well, there’s a whole bunch of reasons why that doesn’t seem to happen. Maybe television is watched inside the home, making the people on it less remote and more approachable; maybe people on television are just displayed smaller than life while those on a movie screen are bigger.
Maybe being interrupted every seven minutes for a commercial for laxatives makes it hard to generate gravitas. Maybe television has Charlie Sheen on it.
Pretty much the only thing television can’t do these days is pack two hundred million dollars worth of special effects into ninety minutes, and again we’re back to the movies becoming more and more about effects.
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This hasn’t exactly sidelined actors entirely, but who were the real stars of Gravity Sandra Bullock and George Clooney – a duo that’s about as close as you can get to Hollywood royalty these days Or all those 3D chunks of space debris tearing apart everything in their path And why didn’t the Oscars get them to present an award Or even just use them to get award winners off the stage when their speeches ran long
Actors do still have one perk over the special effects: the effects don’t get their names on the posters. The downside there is that often their names are used merely as signposts to guide audiences as to what kind of massive special effects they can expect to see on screen.
If a movie stars Tom Cruise, we can expect futuristic war machines; if it stars Will Smith, we can expect aliens with maybe some war machines mixed in. Mark Wahlberg Alien war machines.
And with Hollywood throwing all their cash at big special effects-heavy movies, where are the next generation of movie stars meant to come from It’s hard to impress audiences with your rendition of tortured humanity when half the movie involves you pointing up at the sky then shouting “Run, it’s going to use us as toilet paper”.
It’s hardly surprising that most of the breakout stars of the last few years – Jennifer Lawrence, Kristen Stewart – have come from adapting young adult novels where characters are more important than action; after all, in a novel “then the spaceship exploded” is usually a less interesting phrase to read than “then she stared getting it on with her hot teacher.”
Today Hollywood is running a hollowed-out business model where the only films that get made are nine-figure budgeted blockbusters or four figure budgeted indy productions. Guess which one is the best way to turn actors into stars
If you said “neither”, go get yourself an ice cream out of the fridge: the mid-range movies – you know, the ones that had to rely on story and acting to keep people interested – are exactly the kind of films that aren’t being made, and without them No star is born.
