Red Carpet: The Big O

Big, overbaked, bogus L. A. They tell you that the line between reality and fakery is very slim here, and that all actors have something inherently wrong with them. People like to think of Los Angeles (and Hollywood in particular) as being out of proportion to everything else, but the truth is that Los Angeles is just like everywhere else and probably more like Chicago than you ever realized.

They roll up the red carpet early here. They have to; above all else Los Angeles is a business in the business of making money, not dreams. Dreams can be made any old time of day, but money, real money is made in the early morning hours, over thirty-dollar yolk-less omelets and designer water trucked in not from Italy but from your ordinary local tap.

Awards shows are artificial contrivances with a little bit of ductile voodoo thrown in for good effect. Like the cars that get towed from Sunset Boulevard, like the European misconceptions of California, awards shows are things to be taken away in the night.

L. A. glories in its vending-machine culture. It used to be the second cultural capital of America, before people smartened up and realized that culture is really about who has better temporality, artificiality, and parallel universes. It wasn't too hard for Las Vegas to snatch the second spot out from under Los Angeles' red-hot klieg of a sun.

It's all about the now, now. Asking why will simply cost you time and money.

The 2007 Oscars, coming as they did right at the tail end of the writers' strike, seemed more a period piece than they did a party. The award for best dressed went to a man (Viggo Mortensen) and no one seemed in danger of being devoured by a dress from a second-tier designer. The only person who did a valorous "I can take this" cakewalk was French and no one wore anything that exposed their striving to the elements.

That's why we needed Diablo Cody. Cody's been a stripper, a phone sex operator, an author, and a screenwriter. She's inked up her right arm and in her quasi-Egyptian toga looked more like a daylight dancer at the Seventh Veil than she did a Perma Press star. And yet, in this oddly subdued year, Diablo Cody is a star, of the biggest and brightest magnitude imaginable. That's what happens when you've had a run of good luck that hasn't been deliberated, steam-cleaned, and delivered with the morning paper. Cody's more connected to the old Hollywood, tin-dream Hollywood, than anyone else out there. Like the rest of us, she has a no-tech Blogger blog, except that hers was called The Pussy Ranch. She has a MySpace page that lists fornication and porn as interests.

She's a neighborhood girl, bless her, in that unflattering leopard-print dress. Pedigree is nothing but a fraudulent accessory. Cody, with her marvelous mongrel talent, won an Oscar on the one night that everyone else chose to look sterile and flat.

This is the New Hollywood. What a wonderful, unreliable, and for once unconditional town.