JAN 11 — We media folk are a gossipy bunch. Tea is served with a side of snarkiness and the news of who is going where or doing what.
Once in awhile someone will mention a “celebrity.” A round of sniffs will commence, often accompanied by eye-rolling.
There is a difference between being talented and being a celebrity. Sadly, it seems that our local talent industry has far too many of those wanting to be the latter.
Take emceeing. I had a boss once who didn’t particularly care about whether an emcee could talk, so long as she looked good in an evening gown. When we suggested one local, well-spoken actress, he dismissed her with an “Oh, the fat mixed one ah?”
It seems my ex-boss isn’t the only one with a preference for talking Barbie dolls. Having attended many media launches, four times out of five, the emcee is decorative as a Tiffany bauble with the vapidity of a lawn ornament. One particularly fetching B-grade model had excellent grooming but had a voice that was the horrible love child of a hyena and mosquito — shrill and persistently annoying.
Model/celeb emcees either speak with a droning monotone (thanks to reading a pre-written script) or extreme faked enthusiasm: An unexplained penchant for bursting out laughing at every lame joke the client makes or speaking as though the Caps Lock key in their mental keyboards was permanently stuck at “On.”
The amount of grovelling people do when, say, Meryl Streep is around is warranted. She is a living treasure and quite possibly the best actress around. Yet even she would give way to someone like, say, Nelson Mandela or Stephen Hawking. Acting is hard work and an art worth celebrating but next to helping end apartheid or making advances in theoretical physics, it would rank a little lower.
Yet in Malaysia, there is a tendency to fall over our feet to elevate certain dubious “celebrities” whose only achievements seem to be winning the genetic lottery. A friend of mine once sent out a text message gloating over a certain blogger celebrity whose dull, poorly written column was finally axed. Said friend unfortunately sent the text to said celebrity. Freudian slip, anyone?
If you’re good-looking, great. Milk it. People will be nicer to you, you’ll get more attention and dating will likely be more an afterthought than an actual pursuit. The trouble is when people put something you were lucky enough to be born with (looks) above things you work to achieve.
That’s part of the reason why our local entertainment scene hasn’t gone very far. Precious few of our local actors are properly trained; many are scouted the way models are. Perfect cheekbones? Excellent bone structure? A face teenage girls would put up on their bedroom walls? Leading man material!
But it doesn’t help that we have created a society where a woman’s brains or talents are not appreciated as much as how good she looks in a photograph. Will the future be a place where more women spend money on plastic surgery than an education? I fear that future’s becoming a reality, especially with the reputation South Korea has, where teenagers get breast implants as birthday presents.
Maybe at heart, we’re all a little shallow. The question is: are we willing to get over it?
* The views expressed here are the personal opinion of the columnist.
