"As a movie lover, she was honored to present the award and celebrate the artists who inspire us all — especially our young people."

After Michelle Obama got criticized for horning in on the Oscars, her communications director issues that as a response.

I loathe that kind of PR — so saccharine and insincere. Look at all the assertions crammed into that sentence. 1. MO is a movie lover. 2. MO was honored. 3. MO was honored as a movie lover. 4. MO presented the award in order to celebrate the artists. 5. Hollywood movie people are artists. 6. Artists do art for the purpose of inspiring everybody. 7. Hollywood movies are made for the purpose of inspiring people. 8. Hollywood movies actually succeeding in inspiring all of us. 9. Young people are especially inspired by movies.

It's such an inane load of nonsense that it seems low and peevish of me to point out so many distinct elements. It was only ever intended to waft over you as a vague fog of a feeling that something appropriately lofty and bland has been said. That's the only relevant meaning.

Oh, wait. Look at this. Something else is being said. We have here a professor of women’s history from Ohio University who has delved into the study of First Ladies. This comes not from the PR department but from academia. Professor Katherine Jellison says: "I get the feeling that she is for the first time maybe really relaxing and enjoying her celebrityhood."

For the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my celebrityhood...

"The best in business is on 'Argo' right now. She’s like Rahm Emanuel."

A non-random sentence from an article with the first sentence: "Political movies are expected to rake in the trophies at Sunday night’s Academy Awards ceremony."

So... "political movies" is supposed to refer to movies with political subject matter, but they win awards because people wage a political campaign for the award.

Too much politics! Remember when it seemed like movies were counterculture or art or something like that?

The "she" in the quote in this post's title is Sasha Stone, who's quoted predicting the award winners this year won't appropriate the occasion and make political remarks: "You don’t want to turn off half of America by making jokes about Republicans."

Will no one shed a tear for the paparazzi of Washington, D.C.?

They're terrified of a Romney presidency.

Photographer and autographer collector Mark Wilkins said a Romney administration would “bring back the same old boring celebrities we saw back when Bush was around.”

“Trace Adkins, all those country stars that no one really cares about,” said Wilkins. “I hope Romney doesn’t get elected because it will slow things down. Right now, there are celebs visiting the White House, four, five times a week that we don’t even know about until after they leave. Romney? Who wants to visit Romney?”

Jennifer Aniston takes 3-minute showers in which she not only accomplishes all the usual showerly things...

... she also brushes her teeth!

Why the harsh discipline? "Every two minutes in the shower uses as much water as a person in Africa uses for everything in their life for a whole day!"

How else are celebrities helping?

• Adrian Grenier has lived in an apartment insulated with old pants.
• Vegetarian and planetary crusader Tobey Maguire reportedly has banned all leather products from his house. ... [H]e also "makes everyone take off their leather belts and shoes and leave them by the door!"
• ... Leo DiCaprio "stays green at home, too—with his $3,200 eco-friendly toilet!"

Planetary crusader, eh?

"This is my first ever blog, so I forgive me if I make any 'blogosphere faux pas.'"

No no no, Donatella Versace. We will not forgive you. But we appreciate your humility as you enter our domain. So go ahead, tell us all about the White House Correspondents' Association dinner:

The evening started with drinks at Christopher Hitchens' house.

Just getting started!

Then onto the Newsweek pre-dinner cocktail...

How does one get onto a cocktail? I'm picturing that cartoon character from the Playboy Magazine jokes page...

... and then the actual dinner....

The dinner was a glamorous affair, as it was last year, but this time round there was a very different atmosphere, in ways that seemed to me to symbolize the huge changes that are taking place in this country as a result of the new administration.

The first thing that hit me was that nobody was using their BlackBerrys. This is a pet hate of mine, and last year lots of the guests were glued to their devices. While George Bush did a little comedy — conducting the orchestra and entertaining people with a speech — the audience was just not that attentive. Many people were talking away and those dreaded BlackBerrys were out in full force.

This year, the minute Barack Obama stood up to speak, there was silence....

There was a friendly atmosphere, it was cool, younger, relaxed and glamorous. Glamour was something that seemed to be completely lost before....

The key to this administration's appeal is, I think, that it's so energetic and positive, and (yes, one of my favourite words) glamorous!...

Glamour. Is it wrong to have glamorous leaders that glamorous people find glamorous?

It was a long night but the time flew — it went so go quickly. People genuinely had fun. I've been to so many of this kinds of events where you have people looking at their assistants as if to say, "Can I leave now?" There was none of that.

Hey, I want an assistant, an assistant that can read my eyes when they say "Can I leave now?"!

Everyone was having a good time, and I was amazed by how members of the Obama administration, high-powered people like the Secretary of the Treasury, Tim Geithner, and the Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, were just walking round the room in a really cool and relaxed way. Rahm was carrying his jacket slung over his shoulder. These people look like they know what they are doing.

And, yeah, what are they doing? But they look like they know what they are doing. Per Donatella. With their cool, relaxed walk around the room and their jacket slung over their shoulder. What a relief from Bush!

"American Prayer" of the damned.

I was just complaining about some annoying web video with low production values, but right after I posted that, I watched this new Obama-promoting video, which has the glossiest production values, and I found it impossible to watch... and I knew I wanted to blog about it so I kept forcing myself, but I had to click stop after a minute and a half:



What made it so insufferable? I admit that I came to it from the Corner, which primed me with the line "Personality on steroids: Obama as the coming, secular Messiah," but I don't think it was that.

It was the the insane discontinuity between the sad-sack dreariness of the photographs and those Hollywood celebrities who were made to look as though they belonged in settings of economic despair. They were photographed in black and white. They made sad faces. There's the normally smarmy Jason Alexander, pressing his hands together in mournful prayer. Jason Alexander! Do you think we will take you seriously because you have that serioso look on your face? The repetition of the word "prayer," with one praying celebrity after another, when you know you're going to be told that the answer to their prayers is Obama.... horrible.

And that miserable song. That vehicle for Hollywood celebrities to express their mourning, depressing, hopeful quasi-religiosity. Am I supposed to know it? I Google and find it described in Wired as "Dave Stewart's 'American Prayer,' featuring the former Eurythmic trying to come off like some sort of cut-rate Bono, as he strums a guitar that's not even audible in the song."

Adding to the video's cringe-worthy nature are celebrity appearances by Forrest Whittaker, Barry Manilow, Jason Alexander, Whoopi Goldberg and others, who join forces with on overwhelming level of "We Are The World"-type smugness.

Certain shots are so deeply embarrassing that we had to hit pause a few times just to make it all the way through. Watch at your own risk, and don't say we didn't warn you.

There's a vote over there to ascertain whether it's "the worst Obama song yet?" and it's winning, though not by all that much, which makes you wonder what cringe-inducing, celebrity-infested swill the "no" voters have in mind.

"We Are The World." We had evolved to the point where we all laughed at it, and now, have we suddenly slipped back into that 80s subordination of art to sanctimony? Then, it was for the sake of feeding starving children. Now, that aesthetic has returned in service of a politician. Yet, surely, it's true that we will look back on this election kitsch and laugh. Soon. Like right now.

ADDED: I'm watching this to the end now, and I'm just shaking my head at how counterproductive this is for Obama. These celebrities are so wrapped up in what they appear to perceive as the poignant beauty of their emotions that they don't see that they are beating us over the head with the idea that America is a terrible place. That is: This video is anti-American. That is not the message Obama wants right now!

Also, at 1:35, you can see the display of crosses that I happen to know is on the beach in Santa Monica. I was just there and took this photograph from the amusement pier:



I made it to the end. This video isn't merely terrible. It's a testament to tone-deafness. It resonates in all the wrong ways with the Obama campaign, amplifying the very things that Obama is trying to mute.

"Meretricious prose whose pretense at arch sophistication has become a schlock art form, the written equivalent of a Leroy Neiman nude."

Although that particular phrase comes damned close to being the thing it purports to criticize, the article from whence it comes -- "The worst celebrity profile ever written?" -- is hilarious.

Consider his opening paragraph. Facing a full-page, full-length "classy" cheesecake picture of an unclothed Angelina with a wispy silvery sheet clutched between her thighs, we find this piece of ... prose:

This is a 9/11 story. Granted it's also a celebrity profile—well, a profile of Angelina Jolie—and so calling it a 9/11 story may sound like a stretch. But that's the point. It's a 9/11 story because it's a celebrity profile—because celebrities and their perceived power are a big part of the strange story of how America responded to the attacks upon it. And no celebrity plays a bigger role in that strange story than Angelina Jolie.

So, it's a 9/11 story. That's heavy, dude. And it's a 9/11 story because, um, because, well, celebrities—which were a totally unknown phenomenon before 9/11, as everyone knows—are a 9/11 phenomenon, and Angelia Jolie is a celebrity. A stunning concatenation of insights!

You have to take into account that it's Esquire magazine. It might make sense to write like that within that context. It has a long literary tradition -- they used to publish Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Dorothy Parker -- and they've got some concept of preserving it, I think. It plays out in weird ways sometimes.

Personal notes: 1. I used to have a job -- back in the 1970s -- that included -- among other things -- reading Esquire magazine. 2. I've never seen Angelina Jolie in a movie, never even vaguely contemplated going to one of her movies.

"Vile and vicious and hateful." Rosie O'Donnell gives this reason for going to San Francisco to marry her female partner:

"We were both just trying to come here after the sitting president said the vile and vicious and hateful comments he did on Tuesday and inspired myself and my brand-new wife to fly here this morning."

Quite aside from how it sounds to cite hostility to President Bush as your reason to marry or, more specifically, whether the gay marriage cause is helped by presenting it as a political protest, is it really necessary to tar supporters of the Federal Marriage Amendment this way? It was only two years ago that O'Donnell first publicly said that she was gay. How fast can you expect social progress to take place? Only last summer, the Supreme Court withdrew the power to make homosexual sodomy a crime, and now, already, we are asked to think people are "vile and vicious and hateful" because they want to restrict marriage to different sex couples? It was only a couple months ago that Howard Dean was being praised for instituting civil unions in Vermont, while specifically reserving marriage for heterosexual couples.

The President Bush's statement this week takes a similiar approach to Dean's (albeit by constitutional amendment):

The amendment should fully protect marriage, while leaving the state legislatures free to make their own choices in defining legal arrangements other than marriage.

America's a free society which limits the role of government in the lives of our citizens. This commitment of freedom, however, does not require the redefinition of one of our most basic social institutions.

Our government should respect every person and protect the institution of marriage. There is no contradiction between these responsibilities.

We should also conduct this difficult debate in a matter worthy of our country, without bitterness or anger.

In all that lies ahead, let us match strong convictions with kindness and good will and decency.

Now that is portrayed as "vile and vicious and hateful"? Supporters of gay marriage would do well to show some understanding for the feelings and beliefs of the people they are trying to persuade. The sense of alarm about the proposed amendment is understandable, though unwarranted, but it is counterproductive to become overheated and engage in this kind of inflammatory rhetoric. The light of reason is on your side: why act as if you don't think it is?