Enter the crime scene: Oscars 2012. The sleuths: the audience. The perp unmasked: Angelina Jolie. After years of wondering whether the lady’s People’s Champion banner was just a tad exaggerated, with one out-thrust leg, a husky laugh and speaking dialogue as though instead of presenting an award she was in a soft porn movie, Ms Jolie removed all doubt.
But the clues have been everywhere.
She would insist on holding her adopted children whenever the paps were near; Vogue hinted that she was a demanding fashionista even though she acts as though fashion is the farthest thing from her mind when there are starving kids in the world; she broke up a marriage, denied it, and then told her kids to watch Mr and Mrs Smith so that they could see their parents falling in love; realized she would never live her most infamous role, Homewrecker, down when facing off with one of the most popular American actresses in the world, and so decided on the role of Mother Earth to compensate, and so on.
But murder will out, even if it is the murder of a fictional character.
Every time you see Ms Jolie on the red carpet, her arrogance shines through, as she tilts up her chin and looks down at all the peasants gawking at her. She has no friends. She would never dream of making a movie about say, obesity, no, it has to be about a disturbingly relevant topic preferably from a war zone. Unfair? What can I say, after Gia and Girl, Interrupted and Lara Croft, and gawking myself at her quite incredible beauty, I thought Ms Jolie was the best thing to have entered the public consciousness so I am, really, Fan, Interrupted and there’s nothing more disillusioning than that.
But really, what was she thinking with that entirely inappropriate strut on an occasion that had nothing to do with her? Aye, there’s the rub. As a talk show host said the next morning, Angelina already has our attention, why does she want more? I think there is an answer to that. She seems massively insecure. She knows the public doesn’t like her. (Look at Meryl Streep, hugely respected for her impeccable craft, widely admired on a personal level. Would Ms Jolie exchange her looks for class, integrity and talent, I wonder. No, of course not.) She knows her fame is store-bought, ie media-fanned, so she has to keep the attention on her sex goddess avtaar for as long as it lasts. Thing is, that, too, is media- fanned. There’s no fire here, people. Ms Jolie has anorexic arms, skinny, not shapely legs, and no waist in a short torso. But she has boobs. That’s what men notice. She has a face that is stunning. That’s what women notice. But it’s all she has. And she manipulates her image with the dedication of an Eva Peron on her last, er, legs.
She has not, for instance, been seen with her brother Haven in recent years, after publicly encouraging everyone to think she was in an incestuous relationship: “I am so in love with my brother right now,” she famously proclaimed when receiving her Oscar, and kissing him on the lips at the most opportune moment (when she could be snapped by lurking photogs, in other words). She was wild and free, you see, and weren’t we lucky to have her to admire.
But when she suddenly started carrying her real kids after the media pointed out that she only carried the adopted ones, something started to stink. She will not do interviews on the red carpet with that most unassuming of media men, Ryan Seacrest, because he once called her ‘cold’. She has a long memory, obviously. But dare to forget about her and she will stride down the stage with the mien of a hungry tiger (thank you, Paris Hilton, for that quite inimitable phrase), no shame barred, having drank her ‘vamp juice’ as a blogger put it. Smart woman. The whole Net community is now talking about her under 5-minute appearance which has nothing whatsoever to do with the Oscars.
As for her Versace dress, if yards of material cinched at the waist with two custom slits on the side can be called that, yes, she actually tried to show us both legs before coming to a stop in the Pose That Shook the World, I think Donatella needs to go back to design school.
Ms Jolie may be able to use the news media, but in the year of our lord 2012, it’s a no-holds-barred people’s media that carries the sting, and that is impossible to control. “Angelina Jolie’s arms are skinnier than any kid’s she could adopt from Africa,” said one commentator out there, while another wrote: “Sweet Baby Jesus Angelina Jolie put it away your children are watching.”
A Tweeter said maybe she had a UTI and pushing a leg out while standing was the only way she could be comfortable.Tumblr has started a page where you can dress up your pets or yourself in some slinky, black dress and show a limb through a mile-high rip. The Twitverse has started an account called @angiesrightleg where one of the fake tweets was ‘Look at meeeee’; the account garnered 29,956 followers in 24 hours.
Jim Rash, co-winner for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Descendants‘ (also the Moby lookalike who stars in TV’s Community) has gained a fan following after imitating the legbombing (the latest Internet meme). Ms Jolie was not, allegedly, pleased. ‘Who is that guy?’ she supposedly asked. Even I know the answer to that: He’s the guy you were there to present the Oscar to, you do know why you were there, right? right? The Oscar for the movie your boyfriend’s best friend was in? But we would probably have seen her brain short-circuiting if we had said so; how could anything not connected to ‘Look at meeeee’ register?
Wouldn’t it be great to be a fly on the wall in the Jolie-Pitt household today, a friend asked. Yes, it would, because you would find Brad defending Angie (he must, because in a sense when he defends her, he defends himself and what he did to his former wife), no doubt gazing at her like she’s a prize. She ain’t no gold statue, that’s for sure, but she may suit a man with ‘a sensitivity chip missing’.
Poor Angie. There she was on the fame trajectory she had set for herself so successfully and one Oscar evening, it all went to hell in a handbasket, tattooed on the handle with the figure of Betty Boop, another cartoon creation. The only thing Ms Jolie can do now to shift the focus off her sexless gams and get back into her earth mother mode would be to look for another war, or another child (and nanny) to adopt.
But the mask is off, the case closed. We can all go home and watch a re-run of Friends.
Sheba Thayil is a journalist and writer. She was born in Bombay, brought up in Hong Kong, and exiled to Bangalore. While editing, writing and working in varied places like The Economic Times, Gulf Daily News, New Indian ExpressandCosmopolitan, it is the movies and books, she says, that have always sustained her. She blogs athttp://shebathayil.blogspot.com/