Young Hollywood: They’re Just Like Us!
Posted by casey on 07-01-2008
Every year Vanity Fair publishes a Young Hollywood issue, highlighting who they believe are bound to be the “next big things.” In the past, Mary Kate and Ashley, Lindsay Lohan, and Shia LaBeouf have topped the list, and this year it was all about the cast of “Gossip Girl,” McLovin from “Superbad,” the Jonas Brothers, and a handful of TV stars (Miley was noticeably absent). Here’s a taste of the article, more about generational differences than the celebrities that define them:
As for the class of 2008 pictured in these pages, they inhabit a far more predatory media-parasite environment, a Grand Theft Auto of “gotcha,” which so far they’re handling with aplomb. Easy to track, hard to trap, they belong to the iGeneration, for whom texting and Twittering are as natural as popping orange Tic Tacs, inhabiting and trailing invisible clouds of information wherever they go in the digital eco-system, where online and off-line, real life and Second Life, overlap. Boundaries dissolve everywhere they turn their pretty heads. It’s a short, sharp hop from the wholesome happy perk of Disney’s Hannah Montana, whose Miley Cyrus can’t show a little bare shoulder without the world flipping its bonnet, to the spite-laced hangovers of The CW’s Gossip Girl, where decadence is in full Baudelairean flower. There, every Coach bag contains wanton secrets. Treachery and bitchery gleam from every compact mirror. Youth and beauty have their privileges, among them being the ability and agility to roll out into the hazy dawn following the squalors of the night before and still possess the throwaway glamour of a Bryan Ferry song. A fan craze and a critical fetish, Gossip Girl has hit the sweet spot of the Zeitgeist, the X mark where sex appeal and pop sociology intersect and the story lines hold an illusion of seamlessness, as if they sprang full-blown from the brow of Entertainment Weekly.
As I was reading through the profiles of this years picks, I was struck with the idea that while it is a round up of budding young Hollywood, it reads like a case study on American teens. Like the “Celebrities – They’re Just Like Us!” feature in US Weekly, every one of the famous faces could be replaced with a lineup of teens and young adults, and the results would not waver.
- When asked about the last book they read, names like Chuck Palahniuk, Ken Kesey, Norman Mailer, S. E. Hinton came up. It seems teens are more concerned with reading the classics rather than picking up the latest releases on the bestseller list. Refreshingly, only one admitted to not picking up a book in years.
- The consensus on movies was just as classic, with “Pulp Fiction,” “Boogie Nights,” “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,” “American Psycho,” and “Wizard of Oz” mentioned as favorites.
- When asked what they listen to, iPods were loaded with a eclectic mix of old and new: The Doors with The Killers, The Beatles with M.I.A., Garbage with Britney Spears, AC/DC with Mariah Carey. Instead of focusing on one genre of music, variety is the spice of their lives… or iPods, at least.
- As far as gaming goes, everyone loved the Wii and a handful of the boys admitted to having Xbox, Wii, and Playstation. When it comes to the age-old question of Apple or Blackberry, the vote was split across the board, with only a few having classic cell phones as opposed to PDAs.
Categorized under: Magazines, Movies & Music, TV