This Week in Gossip #9

Hollywood’s diversity promises were a big lie, AI continues to haunt us, and not one but two Taylor Swift stories.

1. Shock Horror, Hollywood's Pledges to Diversify Were Total BS

I’ve been covering pop culture professionally for close to seven years now. I started after #OscarsSoWhite had gone international and right before #MeToo unfolded. So, I’ve heard countless promises over the years from entertainment industry figures regarding plans to make the field more inclusive. It'll get better, honest! We'll put some money into getting non-cishet white dudes behind and in front of the camera! Diversity is so in these days! To the surprise of literally nobody, a recent report by USC Annenberg’s Inclusion Initiative has declared this recent spate of pledges to be "performative".

The USC report found that a total of 116 directors were attached to the 100 top-grossing domestic films in 2023, but just 14 of them, were women. Only four of them were women of colour. The major studios simply aren't pulling their weight. It was a great year for the likes of Greta Gerwig, Celine Song, and Adele Lim, but, of the top ten highest-grossing movies of 2023, only one was made by a woman (granted, it was Barbie and that made more money than any other movie, but you get the picture.) Stories like Gerwig's are still the exception to the rule, and it's a far starker picture for people of colour, who get fewer opportunities and often struggle harder to get follow-ups greenlit. Just look at how quickly Disney and Marvel "sources" rushed to blame Nia DaCosta for The Marvels' flopping.

Hollywood isn’t an old industry in the grand scheme of things, but it is one wedded to extremely archaic ideas of success and opportunity. The nepo baby conversation was especially focused on film and TV for this exact reason. Assuming you’re not the kid of a studio executive or A-Lister, getting your foot in the door often relies on a) the school you went to, and b) if you are seen as “relatable” to the old guard. Colin Trevorrow went from Sundance indie to Jurassic World because Brad Bird recommended him to Steven Spielberg by saying, “hey, this guy reminds me of me!” White guys are seen as universally appealing in a way that the rest of us aren’t.

Change is typically slow and incremental, but it’s especially infuriating when you’ve had to watch the most performative demonstrations of it from multi-billion-dollar corporations. After the murder of George Floyd, places like Disney played the penitent media giant in promising that they would make greater efforts towards racial inclusion and representation. That mostly involved adding parental warnings on Disney+ for some of their iffier old movies. People like Bob Iger and David Zaslav are still wedded to outdated and provably wrong ideas about what makes money, and that usually means ignoring vast swaths of the population. When they’re proven otherwise, they learn the wrong lessons. That’s why I doubt Barbie will lead to a slew of indie directors with unique visions getting free reign over major IPs: we’ll just get more toy movies instead.

What will it take to ensure true and verifiable change? Probably a total strip-down of the industry and mass firing of boardrooms on top of a huge cultural shift. We’re currently stuck in the middle of a hell-cycle of bad-faith “anti-woke” nonsense from a bunch of loudmouths who think anything left of an insurrection is communist. They take up far too much of the oxygen in the room and way too many people listen to them when there’s no dang reason to. It’s easy to be smarmy and claim one shouldn’t focus so much on the mainstream for inclusive and radical storytelling, but that’s still what the vast majority of people consume and often only have access to (remember, the average person only goes to the cinema about five or six times a year, and the chances are they’re not going to see the new Justine Triet or Trần Anh Hùng film, if such things were even readily accessible to them.) You need representation everywhere, not just in the margins. We can’t trust Hollywood to do it but at least there are people fighting to get the system to change.

2. Travis Kelce is Almost as Good at PR as His Girlfriend

I’m gonna be honest with you: I’ve spent most of the past few months desperately trying to avoid writing about Taylor Swift. That’s a problem when your job is talking about pop culture, but I feel like talking about all things Tay-Tay is kind of a trap for me. One, I’m not a fan of most of her music, bar a few tunes, and two, I cannot get over my distrust of her image. I find her girlboss posturing hollow. I don’t like the ways she infantilizes herself while simultaneously doing everything in her power to make billions of dollars. I don’t like that she dated a racist creep for a few months at the beginning of 2023 while amassing a killer carbon footprint via her private jet and any comments on these issues were dismissed as misogyny. Truthfully, I find her so tedious. So, you can imagine how much I’ve been swerving around all the coverage of her and Travis Kelce, the American footballer who has become her latest paramour and focus of the “it’s true love THIS time” narrative (pour one out for Joe Alwyn, who’s now being smeared by the hardcore Swifties as some sort of ogre who kept his poor rich girlfriend of six years locked away from the spotlight.)

See, all of that sounds SO bitter, and I don’t like that! I like bringing a keen eye towards gossip and celebrity culture, but nobody finds it fun when I get onto this topic. So, I leave it to others. But then I read this fascinating piece in the New York Times about Travis Kelce’s own publicity machine, and hey, finally I found something intriguing about the TNT trend. This piece delves into Kelce’s carefully coordinated PR spin to become a celebrity outside of football. It says that Kelce’s team are hoping to push him to Dwayne Johnson levels of superstar, and even his family are in on the action, with his own mother having an agent for advertisements and such. It’s obviously working now that Taylor is in the picture but the piece is eager to make it clear that Kelce spent years laying the groundwork for his ascent into the A-List.