On Sunday, tens of millions of viewers will sit down to watch the Academy Awards. Endless attention will be paid to the celebrities walking down the Red Carpet, who they’re with, and what they’re wearing, with plenty of follow up on who won, what they said, and how they looked.
While extremely entertaining, how healthy is this national fascination with celebrity?
We are a celebrity obsessed culture, and perhaps anything which fuels that fire is not to be welcomed. Or not. Perhaps tere isn’t something healthy and positive about this fixation, at least some of the time, and especially as it relates to the movies.
Americans have always been especially interested in celebrity when facing tough times. They breakout years for Hollywood were those defined by the Depression and WWII. As shantytowns mushroomed and then as sons, husbands and fathers went off to war, Hollywood and its stars became increasingly important to America. For a few dollars (or pennies back then), you could enter a parallel world, forget your troubles, and temporarily escape into an exciting and glamorous universe.
And we know from the best scientific studies, that fantasy is a crucial component in our mental health. In fact, if you don’t have fantasy as a part of your reality, something is usually quite amiss.
So, celebrating the Academy Awards and Hollywood, a world which most of us will probably never know, doesn’t seem so bad after all. Look at the movies nominated — disproportionately fantasy or happy ending movies, from Avatar to Inglourious Basterds to The Blind Side.
We need to believe that things always do work out better in order to fantasize that they could have or one day will. In fact, fantasizing about that possibility help keeps depression and cynicism at bay. Just ask any person who believes in things like a messiah, salvation, redemption, heaven or resurrection of the dead. Just ask anyone who cherishes stories of the prophet Elijah or puts their faith in Jesus.
The only issue is when our embrace of fantasy is more than a break from reality which empowers us to re-embrace it, and instead makes us depressed about our regular lives. When our excitement about celebrities demeans our own reality, we have a problem. But when it’s an opportunity to indulge our dreams and lightens our hearts for a little while — that’s a tradition as old as religion itself.
Maybe being excited about the Academy Award is not so different from people celebrating the Sabbath. In Jewish tradition we are told the Sabbath is a little taste of the World to Come, or of the world as we want it to be. For 25 hours we live the fantasy and afterwards return to the world renewed, refreshed and re-souled.
I don’t know if there should be a blessing for watching the Academy Awards, but I know if it does that for the viewers, even a little, it turns out to be a bit of Shabbat on Sunday night, and what’s wrong with that?
Author, radio and TV talk show host, and President of CLAL-The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, Brad Hirschfield is the author of 
posted March 6, 2010 at 12:45 pm
I personally would rather escape reality in a good book, than watching half dressed, anorexic, drug using women walk down a red carpet. I don’t get any pleasure watching the folks in la-la land.
posted March 6, 2010 at 1:18 pm
Good article Rabbi Brad, starts out sounding negative and ends up on the positive side! I have only good memories of the pre-and WW11 days of Hollywood and Broadway, and they made sad and bad times good! In later years living in CA I met and observed many Hollywood stars and I can tell you that they are just like everyone else when they are not acting. If people treat them like idols that is their problem not the stars, and celebrites of Hollywood.
posted March 6, 2010 at 5:38 pm
My favorite film among the Best Picture nominees is A Serious Man, a heavily Jewish film which has a decidedly not-happy ending
posted March 7, 2010 at 12:55 pm
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posted March 10, 2010 at 11:23 am
B”H
How can you compare the spiritual tranquility of Shabbat with the empty-headed moronic event that is brodcast on network television every year?
Rabbi, I thought you had more intelligence than that…