The following two quotes, both pulled from Tracy Wright’s article for Fox News, are excellent examples – at least to me – of why actors should stick to acting.
First we have Sharon Stone, in Italy accepting an Italian lifetime achievement award, evaluating the people of her country this way:
“We have to stop and think about who we choose for government. And if, in fact, we are actually choosing our government or if the government is choosing itself.
“You know, Italy has seen fascism. Italy has seen these things, you guys. And you understand what happens. You have seen this before.
“My country is in the midst of adolescence. Adolescence is very arrogant. Adolescence thinks it knows everything. Adolescence is naive and ignorant and arrogant. And we are in our ignorant, arrogant adolescence.”
“So, Americans who don’t travel, who 80% don’t have a passport, who are uneducated, are in their extraordinary naïveté.”
And then there is Alec Baldwin, also in Italy, providing this deep understanding of the importance of films:
“Television news in the United States is a business. They have to make money,” Baldwin said at a press conference. “There’s a hole. There’s a vacuum. There is a gap, if you will, in information for Americans.
“Americans are very uninformed about reality — what’s really going on. With climate change, Ukraine, Israel … you name it. All the biggest topics in the world, Americans have an appetite for a little bit of information.
“That vacuum is filled by the film industry. Not just the independent film industry, not just the documentary film industry, which are very important around the world. But by narrative films, as well where the filmmakers and the buyers, the studios and the networks and the streamers are willing to go that way.
“I think right now is probably one of the most significant times in our history. Since film began, since the film experience began, it became an art form. It became a business, a huge business. Now is probably one of the most important times in our history for us to make films that will teach people what reality is around the world.”
Tell me: do they give Oscars for ego? Self-importance? Sanctimony?
Do these two people, who have spent most of their lives in a celebrity bubble pretending to be people they aren’t, actually think they are oracles of reality? Intelligence? Insight? When was the last time either of them functioned as non-celebrity anonymous people, experiencing other people in that context?
Here’s an idea for both of them: enjoy your celebrity careers, enjoy the huge amounts of money you make and your ongoing publicity and your adoring fans…
…and don’t use the forum you get only because of your entertainment value to pontificate on how deficient all the rest of us are.
You are actors. That doesn’t make you intellectuals or philosophers or arbiters of how intelligence or naive the rest of us are. Your opinions are no better than anyone else’s…and, if anything, less so, given that you live in such rarefied circumstances/so far removed from the way average people do.
Or, in fewer words: how about just shut the eff up.
