The View from the Cheap Seats (41 page)

Which is, on the one hand, intimidating, and on the other, immensely liberating. The rules, the assumptions, the now-we're-supposed-to's of how you get your work seen, and what you do then, are breaking down. The gatekeepers are leaving their gates. You can be as creative as you need to be to get your work seen. YouTube and the Web (and whatever comes after YouTube and the Web) can give you more people watching than television ever did. The old rules are crumbling and nobody knows what the new rules are.

So make up your own rules.

Someone asked me recently how to do something she thought was going to be difficult, in this case recording an audiobook,
and I suggested she pretend that she was someone who could do it. Not pretend to do it, but pretend she was someone who could. She put up a notice to this effect on the studio wall, and she said it helped.

So be wise, because the world needs more wisdom, and if you cannot be wise, pretend to be someone who is wise, and then just behave like they would.

And now go, and make interesting mistakes, make amazing mistakes, make glorious and fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here. Make good art.

This was the commencement speech I gave at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, May 17, 2012. It became one of the most widely distributed things I've ever done: the videos of it online have been watched many millions of times, and it is also available as a small book, designed by Chip Kidd.

“I learned the poem as a boy, when Death was merely an abstract idea, one I suspected I would almost certainly manage to avoid as I grew up, for I was a clever child and Death seemed quite avoidable back then.”

T
here were authors grumbling about not going to the Oscars. I heard about it from friends. “So why are
you
going?” they asked.

I had written a book called
Coraline,
which director Henry Selick had transformed into a stop-motion wonderland. I'd helped Henry as much as I could through the process of turning something from a book into a film. I had endorsed the film, encouraged people to see it, mugged with buttons on an Internet trailer. I had also written a fifteen-second sequence for the Oscars, in which Coraline told an interviewer what winning an Oscar would do for her. I'd assumed that this would get me into the Oscars. It didn't. But Henry, as director, had tickets, and could decide where they would go, and one of them went to me.

My father had died on March 7, 2009. The Oscars are March 7, 2010. I expect that it will just be another day, and it will not bother me at all, demonstrating that I do not know myself very well, because when the day arrives I am melancholy, and do not want to go to the Oscars. I want to be at home, walking in the woods with my dog, and if I could simply press a button and be there without disappointing anybody, I would.

I get dressed. A designer named Kambriel, whom I met when she had made a dress that would allow my fiancée and Jason Webley to represent conjoined twins, had offered to dress me for the Oscars, and I took her up on it. She made me a jacket and a waistcoat, and I fancy that I look pretty good in them. Best
of all, I now have an answer to the people who ask “What are you wearing to the Oscars?” And it makes Kambriel amazingly happy.

Focus Features, who distributed
Coraline,
are looking after me. The previous night they had a small reception at the Chateau Marmont for their two Oscar nominees,
Coraline
and
A Serious Man
. The partygoers were a strange mash-up of Minneapolis Jews and animators. Even more oddly, I was one of the Minneapolis Jews (or almost. I wound up comparing notes with one of the other partygoers on the St. Paul paper's pulse-pounding exposé that I actually live an hour away from Minneapolis).

The best thing about the Oscars, I realized when the nominees were announced, is that
Coraline
won't win. In the year that
Up
is nominated for Best Picture, which obviously, it won't win, nothing but
Up
can win Best Animated Picture.

A limo picks me up at three p.m. and we drive to the Oscars. It's a slow drive: streets are closed off. The last civilians we see are standing on a street corner holding placards telling me that God Hates Fags, that the recent Earthquakes are God's Special Way of Hating Fags, and that the Jews Stole something, but I can't see what, as another placard is in the way.

A block before we reach the Kodak Theatre the car is searched, and then we're there and I'm tipped out onto the Red Carpet. Someone pushes a ticket into my hand, to get the car back later that night.

It's controlled chaos.

I am standing blankly, realizing I have no idea what to do now, but the women look like butterflies, and there are people in the bleachers who shout as each limo draws up. Someone says, “Neil?”

It's Deette, from Focus. “I just came back from walking Henry through. What a nice coincidence. Would you like me to take you through?”

I would like that very much. She asks if I would like to walk past the cameras, and I say that I would, because my fiancée is in Australia and my daughters are watching on TV, and Kambriel will be happy to see her jacket on television.

We head down into the throng, behind someone in a beautiful dress. It looks like a watercolor of a dream. I have no idea who anyone is, except for Steve Carell, because he looks just like Steve Carell on television, except a tiny bit less orange.

We are scrunched together tightly as we go through metal detectors, and the beautiful watercolor dress is trodden on, and the lady wearing it is very gracious about this.

I ask Deette who's inside the dress, and she tells me it's Rachel McAdams. I want to say hello—Rachel's said nice things about me in interviews—but she's working right now. I'm not. No one wants to take my photo, or, Deette discovers, to interview me. I'm invisible.

At the bend in the red carpet we pause. I look down at Rachel McAdams's watercolor dress and wonder if I can see a footprint. Cameras flash, but not at me.

And we're into the Kodak Theatre. Someone else introduces me to the editor of
Variety
. I realize my facial recognition skills do not work when people are in tuxedos. (Except for James Cameron, whom I have now only ever seen in a tuxedo and would not recognize wearing anything else.) I tell this to the editor of
Variety
. He points to a man with a tan and a huge grin, tells me it's the mayor of Los Angeles. “He comes to all these things,” he says. “Why isn't he behind his desk, working?”

“Er. Because this is the biggest day in Hollywood's year?” I venture. “And it's Sunday?”

“Well. Yes. But he still comes out for the opening of a drinks cabinet.”

I went to the Golden Globes six weeks earlier and discovered that the commercial breaks in award shows are spent in a strange form of en masse Hollywood speed-dating as people
shuttle around the room trying to find friends or make deals, and assume that tonight will be much the same.

The Kodak Theater has a ground floor and, above that, three mezzanines. My ticket is for the first mezzanine. I head, sheeplike, up the stairs. There is a crush to get in, as a disembodied voice tells us urgently that the Academy Awards will start in five minutes. I stare at the woman in front of me. She has blond hair and a face that's strangely fishlike, a scary-sweet plastic surgery face. She has old hands and a small, wrinkled husband who looks much older than her. I wonder if they started out the same age.

And we're in, with no time to spare. The lights go down and Neil Patrick Harris sings a special Oscars song. It does not seem to have a tune. Several people on Twitter who aren't sure which Neil is which congratulate me on it.

And now our hosts: Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin. They come out, they make jokes. From the first mezzanine, the timing is off, the jokes are awkward, the delivery is wooden. But it doesn't feel as if they're playing to us. I wonder if it works on television, and send the question out on Twitter. A few hundred people tell me it's just as bad on TV, twenty tell me they're enjoying it. I decide this is what Twitter is for: keeping you company when you're all alone on the mezzanine.

Best Animated Movie is the second category of the night. My fifteen seconds of
Coraline
talking to the camera go by fast.
There,
I think.
The largest audience that my words will ever have.

Up
wins.

The Oscars continue. In the audience, we cannot see what they are seeing on television at home. Somewhere below me George Clooney is grimacing at the camera, but I do not know.

Tina Fey and Robert Downey Jr. present the Best Screenplay award, and are funny. I wonder if they wrote their own bit.

During the commercials the lights go down and they play music to mingle by. Roxanne does not have to put on the red light.

I head for the first mezzanine bar. I'm hungry and want
to kill some time. I drink whisky. I order a chocolate brownie which turns out to be about as big as my head and the sweetest thing I've ever put in my mouth. I share it.

People are wandering up and down the stairs.

Whisky and sugar careening through my system, I defy the orders on my ticket not to photograph anything, and I Twitter a picture of the bar menu. My fiancée is sending me messages on Twitter urging me to photograph the inside of the women's toilet, something she did during the Golden Globes, but even in my sugar-addled state this seems a potentially disastrous idea. Still, I think, I should head downstairs and, in the next commercial break, say hello to Henry Selick. I walk over to the stairs. A nice young man in a suit asks me for my ticket. I show it to him. He explains that, as a resident of the first mezzanine, I am not permitted to walk downstairs and potentially bother the A-List.

I am outraged.

I am not actually outraged, but I am a bit bored and have friends downstairs.

I decide that I will persuade the inhabitants of the mezzanines to rise up as one and to storm the stairs, like in
Titanic
. They might shoot a few of us, I decide, but they cannot stop us all. We can be free; we can drink in the downstairs bar; we can mingle with Harvey Weinstein.

Someone tells me on Twitter that nobody's checking the elevators. I suspect that this might be a trap, and head back to my seat.

I have missed the tribute to horror movies.

Rachel McAdams presents an award in her beautiful, oh-so-tread-on-able dress.

For the Best Actor and Actress awards, a tableau of people who have worked with the nominees tell us how wonderful they are. I wonder if this works on television. On the stage in front of us it is painfully clumsy.

People below us are milling and chatting and schmoozing more with every commercial break. There is an edge of panic
to the disembodied announcer's voice as she orders them back to their seats.

The man in the bar who reminded me of Sean Penn turns out to have been Sean Penn. Jeff Bridges's standing ovation reaches all the way to the top mezzanine. Sandra Bullock's standing ovation only reaches the front rows of our level and stops there. Kathryn Bigelow's standing ovation covers the entire hall except, for some reason, the top right of the first mezzanine, where I am sitting, where we remain sitting and clap politely.

It all seems to be building up to a crescendo, and then Tom Hanks walks out onto the stage and tells us, with no buildup (if you exclude months of For Your Consideration campaigning) that oh, by the way,
The Hurt Locker
won Best Picture and good night. And we're out.

Up two escalators to the Governors Ball. I sit and chat to Michael Sheen, who brought his eleven-year-old daughter Lily, about the sushi dinner we had two days before, interrupted and ended by a police raid. We still have no idea why. (Next morning it will be a front-page story on the
New York Times
. They were serving illicit whalemeat.)

I see Henry Selick. He seems relieved that Awards Season is over, and that he can get on with his life.

I feel as if I've sleepwalked invisibly through one of the most melancholy days of my life. There are glamorous parties that evening, but I don't go to any of them, preferring to sit in a hotel lobby with good friends. We talk about the Oscars.

The next morning the back page of the LA
Times
Oscar supplement is a huge panoramic photograph of the people on the red carpet. Somewhat to my surprise, I see myself standing front and center, staring down at Rachel McAdams's beautiful watercolor dress, inspecting it for footprints.

This was originally published in the March 25, 2010, issue of the Guardian under the title of “A Nobody's Guide to the Oscars.” I've restored the original title here. It wasn't about being a nobody, it was about being out on the days when you would best be at home, and melancholy.