This post is about legitimizing cultural capital. In it, Carles takes a satirical and irreverent look at the Academy Awards show, exposing the arbitrarity of the aesthetic standards and entertainment mores it attempts to establish as preconceived truths. By admitting that he didn't watch the show while going forward with a "lil recap" anyway, Carles mirrors the likely conduct of most Academy voters, who operate with an instinct for what they should vote for rather than through any reference to a personal subjective point of view. This also established the larger truth about awards shows: the winners and losers are irrelevant; and the culture industry as a system always wins. Who has it defeated? The subjugated consumers of its product. Having already joylessly consumed it out of social duty, consumers must again huddle together around a TV set on awards night to venerate the same product, a reiteration of the cycle that models how tenuous notions are elevated into shibboleths by rote social rituals of homage.
Carles compiles in his ersatz recap a seemingly random list of celebrities who are distributed across the accepted highbrow-lowbrow culture continuum, a parody of the way in which the awards attempt to sanctify the cultural worthiness of the chosen winners, establish them as franchises whose cultural capital (manufactured in the red-carpet glitz and kleiglight glare of Awards presentation) can then be transmuted into the cold, hard cash of future ticket sales and merchandising opportunities. To these efforts, Carles counters the true nature of the franchises, the superficial details, the casual semi-libels, the titillating cruidiés of our most famous faces, as crystallized and distributed in tabloids and gossip magazines. Hence, far more significant, though no one is licensed to admit it, is the award for "Tween most likely to participate in SEXTING (the act of sending sexually charged text messages)" to something like best supporting actress. Carles implies that these two awards are essentially the same in the fantasy life of viewers.
As usual, Carles concludes with cutting rhetorical questions, through which one must reevaluate the text that has preceded it. (In general, his posts are best read employing a nonlinear, adiachronic method, which encompasses his striking synchronic juxtapositions and the heteroglossic free play he permits to be expressed through his dialogic inscriptions.) The concluding question brings home the colonialist scope of the culture industry project enjoined by the media magnates assembled to glorify themselves: "Should I adopt a kid from Afrika as a performance art piece?" The culture industry produces celebrities who serve as their proxy, adopting the world's peoples and conscripting them into the army of entertainment consumers, for their own good. Then this act of aggression is disavowed as a mere act of entertainment itself, "performance art." But of course, to perform is to preform.
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