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UD doesn’t watch these things, but…

… in a story about the Golden Globes, she notes that Ricky Gervais said this to his Hollywood audience:

You’re in no position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real world. Most of you spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg.

A canny comment, and quite true: As UD has pointed out before on this blog, it’s rare for our stars to have attended even a little bit of college.

(Gervais himself earned upper second-class honours in philosophy.)

Margaret Soltan, January 6, 2020 4:44PM
Posted in: extracts

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4 Responses to “UD doesn’t watch these things, but…”

  1. Matt McKeon Says:

    I’m glad Ricky was there to tell everyone what they could say.

  2. Margaret Soltan Says:

    Matt: Not so much that – obviously everyone there gets to say a lot of what they want to say, quite successfully. And I didn’t watch – read – the whole speech, which I’m sure was obnoxious. On this small and rather interesting point, however, he’s quite right. You have to start being beautiful and charismatic very early in the profession, so it’s unlikely you’ll get as far as college.

    The Hollywood version of the ongoing Varsity Blues story has fascinated me mainly because why should Hollywood parents of Hollywood kids care whether their kids go to college, let alone that they cheat/buy their ways into good schools? Even clearly pretty brilliant spawn of Hollywood, like Carrie Fisher, don’t do college. Their immediately-beckoning world is too beckoning.

    I’m not judging this as negatively as Gervais does – but he’s right to point out that the absence of higher education should make a difference – in many cases – in our willingness to listen to people getting deep/polemical about the world.

  3. David Foster Says:

    It’s interesting, though, that the political views of Hollywood denizens overlap pretty closely with those of academics….

  4. Margaret Soltan Says:

    David: Somewhat. But there are tons of powerful Hollywood conservatives.

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