Cate Blanchett thinks the Oscars would be a lot more enjoyable if they weren’t on TV.
Speaking with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang on their Las Culturistas podcast, Blanchett was surprised to hear that lip readers are analyzing every televised moment.
That line of thinking kicked off when Blanchett lamented the pervasive presence of phones, noting, “there’s so few spaces that you can go now, where you are private. That’s what I loved about the late ’80s [was] going to all of the dance parties in Sydney for Mardi Gras. People were just there. They were so present, you know, they were just together, collectively, having a great time. It was non aggressive. No one was being recorded. No one cared what anyone did.”
Rogers and Yang recommended a club in New York City called “Basement,” which forbids cell phones inside, a policy Blanchett said is “such a relief. I think people are profoundly relieved when they feel they don’t need to record [something]. I can just tell people. Or not.”
“But now it feels like that chasm between that kind of event, that ideal, is widening from the thing that’s very common now at, like, an awards show where you’ve got lip readers, you’re being photographed-“
“Lip readers?” Blanchett asked incredulously. The hosts explained that on platforms like TikTok, for example, people will pore over videos of two celebrities seen talking at an awards show to try and figure out what they’re saying.
“And it looks like it could be exactly what they’re saying, in a way that’s a little bit… odd,” Rogers said.
“That’s really, what? I mean, do something. Learn Ikebana or something, like a skill that’s actually beautiful,” Blachett said.
Yang added that things like lip reading make events feel more “treacherous,” and Blachett agreed.
“I mean, I say, I know it’s blasphemy, go back to the day when it wasn’t televised,” she suggested. “Bring that back and just have a great party where people can just let go.”
She added that the entertainment industry is at a “pivot point, and so we need to gather together and celebrate what it is that we do, without it having to have any public-facing.”
“I mean, the fashion is great, and all of that stuff,” Blanchett said. “We’ll find out in the end who won or who didn’t win. But it would be so nice that that happened behind closed doors. [It would be] absolutely a very different evening.”
Blanchett was on the show to promote her new film, “Black Bag,” which costars Michael Fassbender and was directed by Steven Soderbergh.
