Monday, August 04, 2008




Contact Music and the National Enquirer are reporting that Justin Timberlake may be hosting the Academy Awards next year and if that’s true then – at the risk of sounding naïve and inspiring the snorting, breathy anxious excitement that film nerds get when they get a chance to show that they were always ahead and knew better– like the ones who traveled in a pack at the Village Voice when I was working there would do – post Jennifer Hudson winning an Oscar, I’d say the Academy Awards have official jumped the shark.

Contact Music reports that some source said:

"Justin is more than a singer, he's a song-and-dance man - and turned in a performance (at the ESPY Awards) any comedian would envy. Our first question was, 'Can we get him?' "Justin does it all, and knows how to work a star-studded audience."

Which really hammers it home that you really don’t need to be THAT great to get work – you just need to be there, relentlessly.

As far as products go, the Justin Timberlake product and the Academy Awards product don’t overlap. The Academy Awards are essentially historical, they reach back nearly a hundred years. Justin Timberlake is a very contemporary product. He’s high impact, highly controlled, synthetic, cocky and very importantly, he’s quite young. He’s even got a high voice and a smooth chest to emphasize his link to a young demographic. He embodies a lot of the ephemeral fad based lack of attention span that contemporary youth culture involves. I don’t see the overlap between him and the Oscars.

Mind you, this is Contact Music and the National Enquirer. Contact Music will often run really amazing stories but you’ll find that they haven’t been run anywhere else so, you know. Let’s not all start opening veins over this one just yet. [source]

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