No one loves Hollywood like Hollywood loves Hollywood. Want to win hearts in Tinseltown? Repeatedly tell its residents they’re supreme agents of power at the centre of the universe. Build statues in their honour and they’ll happily unveil them. Give them a prize and they put on their best frock to pick it up. Write them a love letter and they will recite its contents back to the rest of the world in widescreen.
This decade alone, two best-picture Oscar winners – The Artist and Argo - have been direct odes to the brilliance and romance of LA’s film industry.
Next year, it’s the same old song. La La Land, Damien Chazelle’s musical homage to making it in Hollywood, which features Ryan Gosling as a jazz pianist and Emma Stone an aspirant movie star, has won the audience award at the Toronto film festival, making it frontrunner to go all the way at the Academy Awards.
As propaganda goes, it’s easy to decipher both message and motive. Movies need to maintain their place in the market, and assertion of self-worth is always a good way to shore up a flagging concern. Hence the intensification: as the effort of coaxing us from our homes becomes ever more daunting, so the number of movies coat-tailing on the golden age of cinema rises. Generations too young to remember the razzle-dazzle need to be propagandised, and the rest of us to be reminded of the magic of the picture palace.
And yet, I have to say, I’m still looking forward to La La Land.
Self-cannibalisation isn’t always a bad thing; nor is it unique to cinema. But when other mediums go meta, it tends to be to more acclaim and less disdain. On telly, my favourite programmes are all about telly: The Trip, The Larry Sanders Show, Gogglebox. Nabokov’s Pale Fire isn’t sniffed at for being a book about reading a book. Ditto Austin Wright’s Tony and Susan. Plays-within-plays have considerable history; Velázquez’s Las Meninas is one of the world’s great masterpieces.
All art, good or bad, is a mirror. We shouldn’t blame Hollywood just because theirs is so big, so glittery, and so in our face.
Biscuit-barrel politics
The Mumsnet biscuit quiz is an open goal. What easier way to make yourself relatable than confessing a fondness for Hobnobs? That’s what Nick Clegg opted for. David Cameron neatly juggled class and lard (“Oatcakes with butter and cheese”). Gordon Brown sounded endearingly addicted (“anything with a bit of chocolate”). Small wonder such scoffing at Jeremy Corbyn’s parodic response: “I’m totally anti-sugar on health grounds, so eat very few biscuits. But if forced to accept one, it’s always a pleasure to have a shortbread.”
Yet it’s worth comparing this to the other political leader-snack news that broke on Monday: Donald Trump Junior’s Skittles rhetoric – horrific not just for what it implied about migrants but because it revealed Trump’s frame of reference as a neon-lit nutritional wasteland. In Daniel Radcliffe’s new film, Imperium, the actor plays a cop who goes undercover in Washington to infiltrate a gang of white supremacists. This involves saying hateful things and attending a party in which a tray of cupcakes with swastika icing is passed around: fascism spelt out in red velvet and cream cheese.
Shortbread might be boring, but many of the alternatives on offer are much less savoury.
Cake-filled rooms
The world’s changing cake habits could also be credited for the news that more and more of us are so fat we require firefighters to free us from our bedrooms. Another probable factor in increased eating is happier: the decline in smoking. New figures suggest that only one in six of us is a current puffer. One key reason, I think, is that teenagers these days already have their fingers occupied. It is possible to juggle a smartphone with a ciggie, but it’s tricky. Plus, though the iPhone 7 may be waterproof, few screens respond well to a close encounter with a fag butt.
