The Obsession with Movie Stars
Why people love the red carpet.
Hundreds of millions of people watch the Golden Globes and Academy Award telecasts, and copious adoration is directed at the movie stars walking the red carpet — what they’re wearing, who they’re with, what they will say to the talent holding the microphone. This adulation is only a highlight of fandom. The magazine racks at the grocery check-out offer us every salacious detail of the stars’ lives, whether true or not. The celebrities’ opinions are picked up by the media and attain far greater importance than they should. The actual lives of these celebrities take on more meaning than should be attributed to these mere mortals who just happen to be born attractive, have an ability to sincerely portray the emotional content of other characters and garner more than a little luck to make it in Hollywood.
Movie stars are glorified in ways that are usually reserved only for music stars, monarchs and dictators. The difference is monarchs and dictators demand obeisance. The autocrats inherit or fight for their position, and all their subjects are duty-bound to honor them, whether the people like them or not. Like music stars, movie stars are voluntarily given a benighted status by their followers that have nothing to do with who they really are. People are obsessed with big screen actors and imbue them with unrealistic…
