The Oscars: A Night With The Celebs, Whom I Love
Look at the stars, look how they shine for you
By Kaleb Horton (MTV.com|Twitter)
Hi everybody, I love celebs. In my capacity as a regular person, they’re my favorite thing. They’re just like us, but here’s the dirty little secret: They’re not just like us. They’re better than us. Skinnier, healthier, richer, more glamorous. By every metric available to modern science, celebs are the better version of people.
Every year, these celebs gather together in the most glamorous place in America: Los Angeles. Specifically, the mall at the intersection of Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue, which houses such luxurious businesses as Forever 21 and is just across the street from shops selling everything from liquor to garbage.
They gather in this special mall for the Oscars, an awards show where we find out once and for all which celebs are the best celebs. This is a very long and glamorous process where the celebs are made to sing, dance, smile, and cry for us, because they have to give us what we want. That’s their job. But sometimes they’re not good at it. Some of the celebs are bad celebs. For example, everyone knows that Donald Trump is a bad celeb for abandoning glamour to install an authoritarian regime in America.
But anyway: The suits! The gowns! The lights! It’s all very intimidating to civilian eyes, but mine are better-trained. This isn’t my first rodeo. I knew what the celebs were feeling and thinking as the whole world judged them. I knew it all.
The Oscars are very exclusive, however. Only people who are used to breathing the same air as the celebs — and also professional seat fillers — are allowed to observe them in person. So I had to settle for the next best thing. I hopped in my car and headed up the famous Mulholland Drive, to sit at the farthest reaches of the Hollywood Bowl Overlook. At the very least, I hoped to see some of the Oscars from the windows of the stately midcentury-modern homes beneath me. With the roads of Hollywood closed, this was the closest I could hope to get to the celebs.
It was dark and cold when I escaped traffic and made it to the Hollywood Hills. And empty. Mulholland Drive was deserted. And the Hollywood Bowl Overlook, a hillside tourist hangout with a trail that leads to a panoramic view of Hollywood, was closed. Fenced off. Even the parts where you used to be able to hop the fence proved unhoppable. But I would not be defeated.
I searched the perimeter for vulnerabilities, but there were none to be found, and time was running out. The Oscars were already on. The celebs were already being judged for me and I was shaking the rails of a fence in the dark. So I surrendered my dignity and scaled a rock face that led to the overlook, grabbing a dangling tree root like a rope and praying for the best.
By the time I got there, after several false starts, I was muddy, grimy, and totally unworthy of the celebs. And in my shame I stood there, listening for the sounds of the Oscars. I found them soon enough, in the living room of a huge house above me, and in a living room of a huge house below me. I couldn’t make out any of the words the celebs said, but I could see their glamorous faces, and I could hear the muffled rhythms of their speech. They sounded articulate, noble, witty, and thankful. Exactly how they’re supposed to sound.
For about an hour, I sat down on the hill and observed. I shook my head at all the liquor bottles and cigarette butts. So many people had been on this hill, and none of them respected the celebs like I did. They took Hollywood’s legacy of glamour and corrupted it with vice. I distracted myself by watching the show, where men and women danced at the will of the bearded host, and I was happy.
But then something terrible happened. And you don’t need an expert to explain it to you. A sickening, heart-stopping thing. In the living room of the house below me, I saw one of the Oscar categories.
Best Actor.
Then it hit me. Standing on this cold hill, higher than the highways, higher than any celeb in the world for one night, I realized that these weren’t just glamorous men and women I was watching on a distant stranger’s flatscreen. They were something more sinister. They were professional people who got paid to pretend to be other people.
The celebs betrayed me. They weren’t who they said they were. It was all lies. It was an illusion. Smoke and mirrors. I had been deceived: deceived by the lights, deceived by the beauty, deceived by the glamour way down there in that special mall.
I hung my head in sorrow. I was a sucker. I scaled back down the rock face and walked along the side of the road. Soon, an old maroon Toyota Camry pulled up beside me and rolled its windows down. There were two teenagers inside, their eyes wide with anticipation.
“Hey, excuse me, do you know how to get over that fence?” asked the driver.
“Well, you gotta climb that rock face.”
“Huh,” the driver said, and they sped off into the dark.
Originally published at www.mtv.com.
