There was a brief hiccup when the hairstylist decided to give me 2004 Green Day emo throwback comb-over bangs, but we managed to course-correct soon enough.
I squeezed myself into my hideous suit and finally hopped into a van with my entourage—a BuzzFeed publicist (there to ensure that I didn’t embarrass the company, I’m sure), me, and my date for the evening, Jeremy, a video producer who’d helped create the mess that got us there in the first place.
When you pull up to an awards show, it’s absolute chaos. After the initial shock hits that you’re on a red carpet, just like on TV, and there’s lights and cameras and beautiful people wearing horrifying amounts of bronzer, you start to realize that there’s absolutely no order or reason to what is happening. I imagine this is what animals who have been held in captivity feel like when they’re released back into the wild. There’s a faint sense of familiarity to everything—these are human beings with faces and limbs, I recognize those things—but everything else is sheer pandemonium. Or at least controlled pandemonium.
When you get out of the car, it’s like getting onto the world’s worst conveyer belt. You’re whisked into a tent and along a path, through a security checkpoint where a guard with a gun judges you when you empty your pockets and all that’s inside is lip gloss and oil-blotting sheets. Once you’re deemed safe, you step right onto the stretch of carpet where attendees stop and pose for photographers, before taking another ten steps and then stopping again, and so on and so forth until everybody dies a fiery death. There’s no order to it, at least not at the People’s Choice Awards, so the sequence of people walking along the carpet is simply the sequence of people who happened to arrive at that very moment, and in this very moment, I happen to be sandwiched between Kate Hudson and Jack Black. And let me tell you, photographers don’t give a shit about you, especially when someone more famous is within five feet of where you’re standing. But that doesn’t change the order of things! So then you’re walking along the carpet and photographers are shouting at you, but not as loud as they’re shouting at Kate Hudson and Jack Black. You can feel the corners of your mouth shaking, partly because your cheeks are starting to ache from smiling, but partly because you’re afraid your bangs fell back to Green Day status. A typical photographer interaction goes like this:
“Who are you?!”
“I’m Matt.”
“What do you do?!”
“Um. I write stuff on the Internet.”
At this point, the photographer’s face always drops. “Oh.”
“I’m nominated for an award,” I shouted at one of them in indignation.
And then, “Fine. Look over here. And try not to look like you’re shitting your pants!”
OK, nobody actually said that. But they might as well have.
When the photographer stands end, someone pushes you out of the way to make room for Jack Black, and the conveyer belt continues. The next part of the carpet is where all the press stands waiting with lights, cameras, and microphones, craning their necks to see who’s coming along the carpet. Typically, this is the part where your publicist walks ahead of you, goes up to some of the reporters, and says, “I have Matt Bellassai, the guy with the wine,” and the reporters will shrug their shoulders and shake their heads. Typically, your publicist will try to get far enough ahead of you so that you don’t have to bear witness to this rejection firsthand, but the carpet is far too crowded for you to stray too far without getting lost, so you hear all of it. Nobody wants to talk to an Internet writer when Kate Hudson just walked through.
And of course, I was well prepared for this part of the carpet. After all, I was a writer at BuzzFeed for a couple of years before then, and had found myself on the other side of the carpet rope plenty of times, waiting for one celebrity or another to walk by so I could scream their name and pray they’d stop and give me some innocuous quote. I’d had plenty of hapless publicists come up to me and whisper, “I have so-and-so, from so-and-so,” and I’d shyly wag my head and shrug my shoulders and hope that they didn’t take it personally. It’s all part of the never-ending fuck-fest that is Hollywood. But the conveyer belt plugs along regardless of your feelings. After getting rejected by one too many people with microphones, you’re pushed through another tent and then a walkway and then someone is scanning your ticket and handing you a badge and you’re shoved inside the theater like cattle shoved into a slaughter truck. The conveyer belt has ended, and somehow, you’ve survived.
• • •
We finally got inside the venue, and honestly I don’t even remember what series of hallways and entrances we walked through to get backstage, but the event staff led us to a tiny greenroom where we could hang out before the show started. Now, at this point, I’d seen plenty of celebrities who had, at some time or another, made their way to BuzzFeed for photographs or interviews. I wouldn’t consider myself a person easily star-stricken, no matter how much I fawn over my favorite celebrities on Twitter. But on this night, I was seriously bugging out. Because this greenroom was literally the holding room for every single celebrity who was there that night. On one couch sat the entire cast of Grey’s Anatomy—and sure, that show has been on since the dawn of time, but still, I’d certainly never been in the same room with any of them. In one corner there was Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy and all of the hot people from those CW shows whose names I can never remember but whose abs I’ve seen on the Internet. In another corner stood Chris Hemsworth, in all his meaty glory, and had I not been so deliriously paralyzed by everything that was happening, I would’ve taken a handful of him. But too much was happening all at once. All I could think to do was ask a person with a staff badge where, perhaps, I could find some alcohol, and she looked at me with eyes that suggested she thought I’d somehow snuck inside, before telling me that there was no alcohol backstage. But in any case, the show was starting in only a few minutes, and we had to find our seats inside the theater.
Of course, when you walk into any theater in Los Angeles, especially when you haven’t gotten used to this kind of thing, you sort of lose your breath. It’s almost impossible to tell who’s famous and who’s just a really ridiculously good-looking person, but I didn’t have much time to process everything around me because the show was starting and an army of producers in headsets were barking at everybody to find their seats, sit down, and shut up.
I sat in awe as the show progressed, and one celebrity after another came onstage. We were only a few rows from the front, and could see where each person was sitting, who they were talking to, how nervous they looked before they went onstage (the gratifying thing about Hollywood: nobody knows what the hell they’re doing, except maybe Oprah, and everybody is nervous as hell). Meanwhile, every three minutes, my parents would text me from their viewing party at home to tell me that they caught a glimpse of my face as the camera panned over the crowd.
Beforehand, the producers told us that my category wouldn’t be announced onstage. Here’s a not-so-secret secret about award shows: nobody gives a fuck about the awards. Everybody is here for the glamour and the cameras and the spectacle. The People’s Choice Awards give out something like sixty awards every year, and only about fifteen of them are handed out onstage to people like Ellen and Selena Gomez who are actually famous and not just on the Internet. But the producers did tell us that they would hand out the award in the audience just when they came back from a commercial break, and they would give us a heads-up when that was about to happen. Otherwise, all we had to do was sit and chill.
Commercial breaks during award shows are absolute anarchy. The second the cameras turn off for a commercial, about half of the room stands up and shuffles about, going to the bathroom, heading backstage for a snack, or ditching the show entirely because they’ve seen what they came for and they’re fucking sick of it. An army of seat-fillers—a bunch of hot young aspiring actors and actresses who want to be around famous people—come in and fill all of the empty seats so that when the cameras return, they retur
n to a nice, big room, full of beautiful people who definitely didn’t just play the biggest, most celebrity-filled game of musical chairs. The last thirty seconds before they come back from commercial is like a scene from a war movie, with producers running up and down the aisles, screaming at everything with a face, shoving every warm body into any available seat, skipping over rolls and rolls of camera cord, and elbowing production interns in the head. Honestly, I’m pretty sure I remember seeing one of them pull a gun and shoot an assistant in the neck. It’s an absolutely glorious mess, and twice as entertaining as the actual show.
About halfway through the evening, during one of the commercial breaks, just as the cameras shut off, a producer runs up to me, trailed by a cameraman. She leans in.
“You’re Matt Balthazar, right?” she shouts.
“Um. Matt Bellassai? Yeah, that’s me.”
She shouts again, “OK, good, we wanted to make sure you’re in your seat. Get ready.”
At this point, my heart is pounding, or at least beating as hard as it can beneath the layers of Spanx I’m wearing. I mean, she’s making sure I’m in the right seat, she’s saying “get ready,” that’s gotta be a good sign, right?
She goes back to the cameraman a few rows in front of us and points to me. The cameraman cranes his neck around the camera to get a look at me, he points at me to make sure he has the right fat, balding ginger, and the producer nods.
I’m freaking out. My stomach is churning. I’m sweating through my disgusting Men’s Wearhouse suit because their cheap fabrics aren’t breathable enough to handle my superhuman levels of body humidity.
We hear someone shout, “THIRTY SECONDS TO AIR,” and everybody starts moving in different directions. Producers are screaming into microphones, hustling people this way and that way, barking orders at everyone in sight. “TEN SECONDS,” someone else shouts, and the final chaotic dash for open seats commences. In the aisle where I’m sitting a woman in a dress appears holding a glistening award statue. None of the other nominees in my category are sitting nearby, which can only mean one thing. I prepare my least nervous smile. I get ready to act surprised, to wave to the camera in glee as I hoist my award—my award!—to the sky.
“FIVE. FOUR. THREE . . .”
And just as the cameras get ready to blaze back to life, just as the audience roars back to on-air applause, a seat-filler—some woman in tacky heels and a tight black dress—rushes in front of the camera to try jumping into a seat in the row directly in front of us. The producer’s veins bulge from her neck as she screams, “GET OUT OF THE WAY! GET OUT OF THE WAY!” But people are standing to make room for the woman in the black dress to sit. Everybody finally lowers to their seats, but by then, the cameraman is already moving forward, and in the confusion, he stops on the man sitting directly in front of me. And for a moment, time stops entirely.
I should point out, for the record, that the man sitting in front of me looks absolutely nothing like me. I could understand, even sympathize with the cameraman—the very same cameraman who had pointed directly at me seconds earlier—had the man in front of me been wearing glasses, or had a comb-over, or was wearing a similarly appalling Men’s Wearhouse suit hastily purchased the day before. But none of these things was true. The man in front of me had jet-black hair, a beard, and giant, gleaming teeth, and to top it all off, he was approximately thirty-five years older than me. And sure, maybe that cameraman suffers from one of those diseases where you can’t tell faces apart, or maybe he had recently sustained one of those debilitating injuries to the part of the brain that remembers things for longer than five seconds, but in either case, I might kindly suggest that he pursue a different line of work until he’s able to correctly distinguish an overweight bespectacled ginger from an old coot with fluorescent teeth. But now we’ll never know.
I look sidewise at Jeremy beside me and chuckle nervously. It’s the only thing I can do.
Meanwhile, the cameraman is screaming now. “You won!” he screams at the man in front of me. “Act excited!”
The man in front of me, just as confused as the rest of us, of course, gives the camera two thumbs-up and smiles wildly. On the jumbo screens above us, the man is grinning frantically, and below his face it says “MATT BELLASSAI, Favorite Social Media Star.”
Behind the cameraman, all the while, the producer is hysterically waving her hands. “NOT HIM!” she’s shouting in vain, pulling at her hair. “NOT HIM!” But everything around us is too loud, the cameraman can’t hear, and the man in front of me is waving too wildly for anybody to care.
The woman with the statue comes forward and hands the award to me, but it’s too late. The cameraman is already moving back up the aisle to his next shot, and the producer is following, shaking her head behind him. The lights are dimming. Flames are shooting from the stage. The music begins to blare. And Jason Derulo walks out to thunderous applause.
It’s all over in about twenty seconds.
• • •
The moments afterward are still a little blurry, in no small part because Jason Derulo was screaming onstage. I believe the first words that came out of my mouth afterward were “What the fuck just happened?” Jeremy’s mouth hung open and he started nervously laughing beside me. “Dude,” he said, “I have no idea.” His concern in that moment, I imagine, was making sure I didn’t run directly into Jason Derulo’s flames. “That . . . was a mess,” he said. And then I think I said something like “I want to use this award to bash someone’s head in.”
And yes, to be perfectly fair, they did hand it to me and it did have my name on it—all very exciting, I won! I got to take it home!—but it was also quite heavy and in that moment, I thought, it would have made the perfect blunt object with which to smash a certain cameraman’s soft skull.
Soon enough, my phone started buzzing as people expressed a combination of elation and mourning, like I’d just won a brand-new puppy that someone subsequently stabbed to death in front of me. “Sorry, dude, that sucks,” one friend texted me. “But at least you won!” And then from my mother: “We still love you.” As if the entire incident had cast their love in doubt, however briefly.
The next commercial break, as chaos broke out again, a different producer came to see me and asked if I wanted to go backstage and talk to the press. That’s what all winners do, typically when they walk offstage—you go to a room backstage and the press asks you dumb questions like, “How does it feel to win?”
“Um. Sure, I guess,” I told him. I still barely knew what was going on. My heart was still beating violently in my chest.
The producer led me backstage, back through the doors we’d entered to take our seats, back through the hallway past the holding room. The producer is a few feet ahead of me, and as we walk through a door, another staffer stops me and says, “Do you have a badge to be back here?”
And this, I admit, was my most aggressive diva moment of the night. Because in that moment, I held up the statue with my name on it, looked that wretched staffer directly in the face, and shouted, “DOES THIS COUNT!?”
And I’ll concede, it felt damned good. Almost as good as I imagine it would have felt to smash in that cameraman’s head.
But then she was like, “No. It doesn’t. Do you have a badge?” The producer who’d been leading me realizes I’m not behind him anymore and comes back to fetch me. “He’s with me,” he tells the door staffer. And the door staffer is like, “I don’t care. He needs a badge.”
So I had to stand there like a fool, shamefully digging into the pockets of my wilting Men’s Wearhouse suit for the badge I’d stuffed in one of them an hour before. Meanwhile, Sharon Osbourne walks past us, no badge—and no award (just saying)—while I’m furiously reaching into my jacket for a hint of plastic. Finally, I dig out the badge and I’m like, “HERE. ARE YOU HAPPY?!” And she waves me through like nothing happened.
When I get to the pressroom, someone shouted for me to stand in the corner while they stuck a camera in my face. I had
absolutely no idea what was happening. I held up my award and forced an awkward smile and gave a tiny uncomfortable wave. The camera lingered for what felt like ten whole minutes, then disappeared. That footage, I’d learn after, would be aired later in the show to make up for the mistake, but hilariously, in the background, you can hear someone say, “Who’s he?” And someone else replies, “No idea.”
A man in a suit and white-blond hair approached me and shook my hand. “Congratulations,” he said with a laugh. He introduced himself as the president of the People’s Choice Awards—yes, there’s a president of the People’s Choice Awards.
“Do you know what happened out there?” he asked me.
I laughed at first, because I thought he was joking, but then I realized he was seriously asking me if I knew what just happened.
“Yes?” I said. “The camera was on the wrong person.”
“Did you plan that?” he asked me.
“What do you mean?” I asked back. In my head, I was thinking, “What the fuck are you talking about? This is your show!”
“Oh,” he said. “We thought maybe you told the camera guy to do that.”
I’m sure my mouth was gaping, because he patted me on the shoulder, said something like “Well, sorry about that, but congrats anyway,” and walked away, leaving me to figure out what the hell I was supposed to do next.
A backstage producer came up to me and asked, in the same tone that you ask a child you’ve found lost in a grocery store, “Would you like to find your publicist?” And I nodded my head sheepishly, so we tracked down Liz, the BuzzFeed publicist, who similarly greeted me like a child she’d lost at a grocery store and looked at me with a searching gaze, trying to detect what mood I was in, whether I found this all hilarious or maddening or both.
Everything Is Awful Page 19