Thanks to my savior, Rich at Comcast in Cape May, I was able to catch the Emmys last night. Rich came and fixed the cable at the rental house we're in with record speed after I discovered the TV was only picking up twelve stations, four of which seemed to be tuned to the Ryder Cup and two others devoted to home shopping. Rich figured out the problem and spared my wife and I two weeks of dismal TV and desultory conversation; after all, even Leonard and Virginia Woolf had their lulls.
The pre-Emmy red carpet broadcast was hosted by the unavoidable Star Jones, who looked ridiculous, even though the celebrities she interviewed were too diplomatic to say so (for fear of being blackballed from The View). She was wearing a chinchilla shrug that belonged in a rap video and an amulet as big as a sun dial, which nestled in the capacious cleavage she insisted on showing. She treated every celeb as if he/she were her bestest friend, and made the event all about her, her wonderment at being being treated so nicely by the very celebrities to whom she was shamelessly sucking up. Several of the celebs made reference to Star's upcoming nuptials, a date with destiny all of us avidly await.
This morning in the NY Times, Virginia Heffernan found herself missing the viperish presence of Joan Rivers on the red carpet, and quoted some Rivers line about how she's so old and saggy her gynecologist wears a crash helmet. If Rivers' brand of female self-loathing is to your taste, I can see why you'd prefer her to Star Jones, but the banal truth is--they're both awful.
The winners were mostly predictable, which made the dithering lack of preparation by the winners even more inexcusable. These are supposedly professional actors who, stepping on stage to accept an award, babble and hyperventilate and act like they just won a high school contest. Cynthia Nixon has been an actor since she was a teen--I met her on the set of Tanner '88, where she was playing the candidate's activist daughter--and yet "umm'd" between every other word in her acceptance speech. Sarah Jessica Parker went from her egregious giggly bit into near hysterics as she realized she wouldn't be able to remember and rattle off all the names she wanted to thank.
And those thanks have gotten more and more infantile. If you're going to make a serious statement about AIDS, as Jeffrey Wright did, rehearse it beforehand, don't tack it on to a list in which you thank your agent, etc. I'm sick of everybody thanking their agent and their stylist and their manager and, most of all, their "kids." What do one's children have to do with one's work on the set? It's a fatuous sentimentality. The best personal thank-you ever was when ballet dancer Natalia Makarova, receiving a Tony for On Your Toes if memory serves, thanked her husband, adding with an exquisite shrug of her shoulders, "He didn't help, but he didn't get in the way either." Now there's a witty sense of proportion, which most actors today lack. You're being awarded by your professional colleagues for professional performance; so act like a professional.
Unprofessional: Alison Janney, who insisted fellow nominee Mariska Hargitay get up on stage because she was gowned in the same shade of green, which Hargitay, being a good sport, did. Janney then called out the names of the other noms, who didn't oblige, leaving Hargitay standing up there on stage for no reason, stranded. Then when Janney finished her spiel she didn't even go over to Hargitay so that we could see the two greenies together, thus doubly stranding her. Truly thoughtless.
Unprofessional: The appalling Elaine Stritch, who howled like a screech monkey and acted as if she had never won anything before, making an ungracious statement only half in jest about how happy she was that she had won and the others had lost. I've had it with Stritch, who's trading on the legend of being the Last of the Broadway Broads and demanding tribute with every outthrust of her arms. It isn't enough to be a "survivor." She's coarse and hoarse and no-class.
(Whereas Meryl Streep is so steeped in "class," she metamorphosing into Greer Garson before our eyes; egads!)
I didn't get to watch all of the awards. There was a screeching crash on the street outside, which turned out to be a somewhat confused nun smacking her car into the rear of another vehicle. She had been gambling in Atlantic City and turned south on the Garden Parkway instead of north and ended up lost in Cape May instead of wherever it was she was going. She had driven more than an hour in the wrong direction before getting mired in a maze of side streets. Fortunately, no one was injured and it gave us an opportunity to meet some of our temporary neighbors in their bathrobes.
