Jake Shane was one of three influencers that Vanity Fair hired to cover the carpet at its Oscar party, the first such bash thrown under its new editor Mark Guiducci. It cannot have gone how Guiducci might have hoped.
Interviewing Kris Jenner alongside fellow host Quen Blackwell, Shane seemed at a loss for words, to the point that Jenner haltingly asked the hosts “How did you get this gig?” (“I don’t know, honestly,” Shane replied.) This was perhaps a bright spot, in that it at least had some levity: Shane’s repeated denigration of the film “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” struck a strange and discordant note.
The Oscar-nominated movie, which depicts a mother’s attempts to care for a potentially terminally ill child, came up as a favorite film for guests Julia Fox and Damson Idris, in separate interviews. Shane asked both Fox and Idris if they found the sick child “so annoying.” Idris, looking abashed, remarked that he had no comment and attempted to bring up a provocative sequence of violence in the film as Shane ignored him, shouting, “You know it! Mommy, mommy, mommy! Shut the fuck up, damn!”
Fox, herself a single mom who had described the movie as “Every mother’s story,” murmured “I can’t say that” and trailed off as Shane bellowed “You know that kid was so damn annoying!” He continued to roll his eyes and pull faces as Fox gathered herself and very eloquently described the challenges working moms face. (The whole time, Blackwell was just kind of standing there.) Then, left out there on her own with hosts who seemed entirely unresponsive, Fox ended the interview herself, awkwardly noting that “We’ve dragged this on a little bit.”
In other words, one fruitful moment — Fox, a notorious provocateur, speaking thoughtfully about her own tender experience of parenting — happened in spite of Shane, and another potentially interesting one — Idris, a rising film star, dishing on the scene where Rose Byrne’s hamster explodes — got cut short by Shane’s need to scream over them. It was an object lesson in the fact that, for all it gets denigrated, red-carpet reporting is journalism, and there’s more to being a journalist than conducting a one-sided screaming contest.
I first came across Shane in his role on the most recent season of “Hacks,” in which he plays an influencer meant to tape clips that show Jean Smart’s comedian character in a Gen Z-friendly light. She bristles at how inane they are, and at how Shane’s character simply cannot hear what he doesn’t care to. I had thought it a savage bit of metacommentary about the media landscape, but seeing Shane in action, I realized that perhaps he wasn’t really acting.
The red carpet gets a bad rap; “Who are you wearing?” has been a punchline about celebrity-culture vapidity since the 1990s, and the #AskHerMore hashtag in the mid-2010s sprung up after stars grew frustrated with questions about their gowns. But at least back then they were being asked questions at all! Shane’s manic derision of a movie his guests actually wanted to talk about seemed to speak to a sort of discomfort with the setting, with the idea of asking questions, and, perhaps, with this influencer facing the danger of getting outshined.
Vanity Fair had recently spotlit Shane as among “hosts who are shattering the talk-show format,” on the strength of his podcast, “Therapuss,” in which guests like Rachel Sennott and Hilary Duff are free to ask Shane to edit out anything they say that they’re unhappy with in retrospect. It’s “shattering the format” in that it doesn’t pretend to be journalism, which is fine as far as it goes in Shane’s own lane. (Fellow occupants of said lane, like “Chicken Shop Date’s” Amelia Dimoldenberg and “Las Culturistas’” Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, similarly provide celebrities with a comfortable place to grant the appearance of disclosure without pushing them the way a journalist might.) The problem, as far as red-carpet reporting is concerned, is that preparation and being able to think on one’s feet and respond to what’s actually being said in the moment — all elements of journalistic practice — are more important than personality.
This doesn’t in and of itself matter much: The Vanity Fair Oscar party red carpet is not where many people turn for insights about the state of the world. But every little chip away at standards of excellence is something that our culture cannot get back. It sounds prudish and corny. But it’s hard to imagine the inventor of the VF Oscar party, Graydon Carter, an editor who stress-tested every single word on his magazine’s cover, would have thought that a TikTok personality and podcaster with one joke, expressed with increasing volume but no other development, was an appropriate booking. Like anything, red-carpet reporting is a craft. It ought to be practiced by people who know what they’re doing.
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