How I learnt to stop venting about faux glamour and love the red carpet
The red carpet leading overpaid actors in overpriced couture to self-congratulatory film and TV award ceremonies used to be a source of much conflict in the Thurman household. I hated the pouting and posing, the “Who are you wearing?” interviews. When the 360° Glam Cam was introduced I almost burst a blood vessel.
My wife, however, loved it all — she saw right through the faux glamour and the pretension, but was fascinated by the operation of the media machine laid bare. The Oscars, the Emmys, the Golden Globes, the SAGs, the BAFTAs ... for her these constituted not so much a screen binge as a smorgasbord of meta-meta-level celebrity culture delicacies.
Eventually we found shared ground in praising and complaining about the hosts. Still, after the opening monologues or song-and-dance routines, my appetite was soon satiated. Then a few years ago, the big awards ceremonies — without really adjusting their American orientation and Anglocentrism — got woke.
It was no longer possible for Oscar et al to remain hermetically sealed off from the outside world; discussions about race and gender, representation and representativeness, became part of the discourse around silver screen celebrity (even if this was mostly lip service). Now it was necessary for me to watch the events from start to finish, because if I didn’t I wouldn’t know what to make of my Twitter feed the next day.
The lure of the red carpet thus became associated with the quest to tackle social injustice. I could no longer see it as the acme of inequality, a symbol of consumer capitalist excess. Then a new sort of ambition started to distil in my mind. Perhaps if I, too, could one day step onto a red carpet somewhere this would signify that I, too, was helping to make the world a better place. You can see the logic at work here, faulty though it may be.
I finally got a chance to put the theory to the test courtesy of an invitation to the 58th Fleur du Cap Awards, the Western Cape’s equivalent of the Oliviers and the Tonys, held last week at the Oude Libertas Amphitheatre in Stellenbosch. Reader, I have to admit: I came, I saw, I posed for the Glam Cam. It was glorious.
Awards are seen by many in the arts world as a sort of necessary evil. “You can’t make art a competitive sport,” I heard a certain director declare in the week before the Fleur Du Caps (FDCs to those in the biz), “But we all have to play the game!” Awards bring prize money — which is certain to be welcomed by any artist — but, more valuable than this, they also bring prominence. They bring future audiences, they bring credibility, they bring opportunity.
Perhaps most of all, as I observed at this year’s FDCs, such awards bring validation. For theatre makers who are constantly going cap in hand from state entities to private funders, who are used to working on shoestring budgets and who — applause from audience members and critical acclaim notwithstanding — feel as if their craft is underappreciated, the money that Distell (and, from now on, Heineken) puts into facilitating this validation is money well spent.
The FDCs also faced moments of reckoning in previous years, reflecting an SA theatre sector that is still a site of contestation when it comes to the racial demographics of audiences, casts, creative teams and producers. But on Sunday, as a glorious late summer afternoon drifted into a cool early autumn evening, the theatre community seemed to me more united than divided.
The ceremony itself yielded numerous highlights and poignant moments. Receiving a lifetime achievement award, David Kramer choked up as he spoke the name of his longtime collaborator Taliep Petersen. The late Mncedisi Shabangu was recognised with the best performance by a lead actor award, about two decades after he won his first FDC for Tshepang. And Lara Foot, collecting the best production award on behalf all those involved in Life & Times of Michael K, embraced the spirit of competition as she clutched the much-coveted prize. These awards matter — just ask any of the recipients (or the other nominees). I must add: red carpets and Glam Cams don’t hurt either.