The Intelligent Conversationalist
Page 27
PRIMETIME EMMY AWARD
Now there are lots of different types of Emmy awards and as a result various awards ceremonies throughout the year. You’ve got the Daytime Emmys, the Sports Emmys (I once interviewed for a sports hosting job in an office that contained loads of these—I didn’t, unsurprisingly, get the gig), International Emmys, and it just goes on. Unless you work in television, the only Emmys, dear reader, that you need to concern yourself with are the Primetime Emmys.
BACKGROUND BRIEFING
They started in 1949, and the winged woman holding an atom on the actual award was the designer’s wife. Emmy comes from immy, a term used for the image orthicon tube in early cameras. Actually you don’t need to know that. Sorry.
WHY IT MATTERS TODAY
The Primetime Emmys, which are held in September, are, as with all awards ceremonies, about promotion. They’re usually on the Sunday before the official start of the fall TV season, so hopefully ratings will get a boost from actresses prancing about in nice clothes attempting to step it up and look like a movie star. Trust me, watch any red carpet coverage and some emaciated pundit will trot out that line.
TALKING POINT
Quite rightly for an egalitarian medium, the Primetime Emmys are decided on by—wait for it—more than 16,000 Television Academy members. Take that, Golden Globes.
RED FLAGS
• Don’t point out to anyone in media that the only Emmys that matter are the primetime ones. There’s a good chance that since there are so many Emmys you’ll inadvertently offend someone you may be trying to sleep with.
• The most brilliant line about television came from Oscar winner and playwright Christopher Hampton (Dangerous Liaisons), who wrote in his play The Philanthropist, “Masturbation is the thinking man’s television.” Genius, but again, masturbation may be all you’re doing if you use that when you’re trying to seduce someone who works in television. Unless they’re British. When they’ll agree with you and want to sleep with you because you’re an admirer of Chris Hampton. And because they know this is true.
THE FASHION
The unifying theme in all of these red carpets events is the fashion. This product placement is a serious business for the fashion houses and also the actresses (and indeed actors now) sporting their wares. For the designers it’s all about free advertising; for the thespians it’s about personal branding, even leading to lucrative advertising contracts (allude to Charlize Theron, Keira Knightley, Julianne Moore, and Scarlett Johansson). In 2015 there may have been a backlash against the “mani-cam” (a camera that focuses on manicures), with some actresses being proponents of the #AskMeMore movement, but the red carpet pageant has made them rich, so if you find yourself with limited sympathy for them, you are not alone.
The term stylist didn’t come into vogue until the mid-1990s, basically because the late, great Joan Rivers started making mischief on the red carpet and making fun of all the terrible outfits. Rachel Zoe, who pretty much invented the size 00 (don’t get me started), was one of the pioneers of the Power Stylist. Now they are front and center of the assault to get gowns and merchandise on nominees and presenters, with fashion and jewelry houses flying in reps, collections, and seamstresses to Los Angeles for the final push.
TALKING POINTS
• Prada entered the popular lexicon thanks to a lilac gown worn by Uma Thurman to the Oscars in 1995.
• If there’s a red carpet, Nicole Kidman, thanks to her musician husband at time of going to press, is normally on it, as between them they always have an excuse to be there. Note that Kidman always pushes the envelope in her sartorial choices and cite her at the 1997 Oscars in Christian Dior by John Galliano (the dodgy green and gold one that everybody loved), and ten years later in the bright red Balenciaga with a dramatic red bow at the neck. You are also allowed to make a comment about her Botox and filler levels.
• Some trends need to stay on the red carpet, as they just don’t translate to ordinary people. Recall when Michelle Williams started the mustard fashion craze in Vera Wang, 2006. She looked great. Nobody normal did.
• Occasionally you’ll get an actress remembering her roots as she mixes high fashion with highly stylized main street, most memorably Sharon Stone in Gap and Vera Wang in 1998.
• For Oscar fashion, remember the good: Hilary Swank in Guy Laroche, 2005—the backless dress (she also won the Oscar that year for Million Dollar Baby). The leg: Angelina Jolie in Atelier Versace, 2012. And the ugly: the backward suit: Céline Dion in Christian Dior by John Galliano, 1999. And then there’s Cher in all those Bob Mackie numbers.
• Lupita Nyong’o’s navigation of the 2014 awards season will go down in history as a master class for every starlet out there. Within a few months, she went from an unknown actress in 12 Years a Slave to Oscar winner (for Best Supporting Actress), a contract with Lancôme, household name, and People Magazine’s World’s Most Beautiful person of the year. Her (and her stylist’s) flawless fashion choices on red carpet after red carpet turned her into a superstar.
• Jennifer Lopez wore a belly-button Versace scarf dress to the Grammys in 2000. Completely appropriate for that event (you need to go edgy, fun), but not, obviously, something for the Oscars. That point can be expanded when commenting on every event: “right dress, right event” or “great dress, wrong event” as applicable.
RED FLAG
At the Golden Globes in 2006 Scarlett Johansson got her globes, well, groped by fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi in the middle of an interview. It’s that obvious globe joke that we just don’t do, remember?
* * *
WISE WORDS
To refuse awards is another way of accepting them with more noise than is normal.
—Peter Ustinov
* * *
SOCIAL SURVIVAL STRATEGY
Argument: “Celebrities may deny it, but they’ve all dreamt up acceptance speeches for the Grand Slam—the EGOT. The Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony. Most are no Richard Rodgers or Whoopi Goldberg, though.”
All involved may claim it’s about the craft. For some of them this might even be true, but these people are human beings with all their associated vices and they have all dreamed of winning the EGOT—just that most aren’t good enough to win anything. This is a solid conversation topic and also may serve to make you feel less inadequate in the admittedly unlikely but possible scenario that someone who is up for a gong was several grades below you in high school.
Crisp Fact: “Since 1950, winners (and family members) can’t sell Oscars without first offering them to the Academy for the princely sum of a dollar.”
The Academy Awards is all about the money. No more, no less.
Pivot: “Who would you thank in your Oscar acceptance speech? Don’t pretend you haven’t practiced it in front of the bathroom mirror!”
Ask this, and the answer you receive may assist in deciding whether you want to bed the person you’re talking to or not. Everyone has thought about it, and their answers can be quite revealing.
CONCLUSION
School’s out. Feeling like a know-it-all yet? Well, perhaps not that, but you surely now have enough to cover cocktail conversation, which is the most important type of discussion most of us have to deal with on a regular basis.
I’m aware that as with when Google Earth was released and the first thing you did was check out the street where you live before venturing to unknown locales, your initial instinct with this book was to head to the Cheat Sheet you were already an expert in, and it will have done nothing for you. However, I hope that you then went on to others that provided a soupçon of enlightenment. Yes, these Cheat Sheets are but an overview, but isn’t that the most important type of knowledge to possess? To understand the news today, what we really need to know is how stories fit into their larger themes. Life is a jigsaw puzzle.
In this noisy day and age, with all the “expert” opinions out there, it can be tricky to separate truth from “truthiness,” the Orwellian tend
ency to believe something regardless of the facts. Maybe, just maybe, this book has helped you with this. I hope that it has given you some sane arguments and one or two “crisp facts,” which are essential if you’re ever to clinch the case you are making for whether Jennifer Lawrence should have worn purple or that the only security guarantee for dictators is nuclear weapons.
If I’ve done my job, this volume has become a useful security blanket and perhaps even provided you with a moment of superiority where you need it most. And it will be just a moment. A long dispute and both of you are wrong. At the very least, you’ll now know how to subtly switch the chat onto a terrain that you are comfortable talking about, something that all good generalists are specialists at.
But most of all, I hope that The Intelligent Conversationalist made you smile. What other tome out there even attempts to cover both an actress’s sartorial and SCOTUS’s decisions, after all?
* * *
WISE WORDS
Don’t raise your voice, improve your argument.
—Desmond Tutu
* * *
Also by Imogen Lloyd Webber
The Single Girl’s Survival Guide:
Secrets for Today’s Savvy, Sexy, and Independent Women
The Twitter Diaries:
A Tale of 2 Cities, 1 Friendship, 140 Characters
(with Georgie Thompson)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Imogen Llyod Webber is a New York–based British author, broadcaster, PEOPLE Now’s Royals correspondent & Broadway.com’s senior editor. Educated at Cambridge University and a former MSNBC contributor and Fox News regular, she has made hundreds of appearances on air talking everything from Hillary Clinton to Hamilton. Her cheat sheets got her through all but two of them. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Introduction
SUBJECT ONE—ENGLISH LANGUAGE
Cheat Sheet 1—Spelling
Cheat Sheet 2—Grammar
Cheat Sheet 3—Separated by a Common Language—English and American
Cheat Sheet 4—Debate
SUBJECT TWO—MATH AND ECONOMICS
Cheat Sheet 5—History of Money
Cheat Sheet 6—Economists
Cheat Sheet 7—A Quick Guide to the Credit Crunch (c. 2008) and Eurogeddon (Still Going)
Cheat Sheet 8—American Dreamers—the Good, the Bad, and the Aha!
SUBJECT THREE—RELIGION
Cheat Sheet 9—Religions
Cheat Sheet 10—Religious Holidays
Cheat Sheet 11—Religion Is No Excuse
SUBJECT FOUR—HISTORY
Cheat Sheet 12—Basic American Beginnings
Cheat Sheet 13—Grid of American Presidents
Cheat Sheet 14—American Imperialism
Cheat Sheet 15—Grid of Kings and Queens of England from 1066
Cheat Sheet 16—World War I, World War II, and the Cold War
Cheat Sheet 17—Middle Eastern History
SUBJECT FIVE—POLITICS
Cheat Sheet 18—The American Constitution
Cheat Sheet 19—American Law
Cheat Sheet 20—Political Scandals
Cheat Sheet 21—Elections
SUBJECT SIX—GEOGRAPHY
Cheat Sheet 22—Map One: World Map
Cheat Sheet 23—Map Two: Nuclear Weapons
SUBJECT SEVEN—BIOLOGY, AKA SEX AND GENDER
Cheat Sheet 24—Life and Death
Cheat Sheet 25—Feminism
Cheat Sheet 26—Homosexuality
SUBJECT EIGHT—CULTURE
Cheat Sheet 27—Authors You Need to Know About
Cheat Sheet 28—Artists You Need to Know About
Cheat Sheet 29—Composers You Need to Know About
Cheat Sheet 30—Theater
Cheat Sheet 31—Awards Season Conversation
Conclusion
Also by Imogen Lloyd Webber
About the Author
Copyright
THE INTELLIGENT CONVERSATIONALIST. Copyright © 2016 by Imogen Lloyd Webber. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.stmartins.com
Cover design by Young Jin Lim
Cover illustration by Steven Noble
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Names: Lloyd Webber, Imogen, author.
Title: Intelligent conversationalist, the: 31 cheat sheets that will show you how to talk to anyone about anything, anytime / Imogen Lloyd Webber.
Description: First Edition. | New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2016.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016000034 | ISBN 9781250040473 (paperback) | ISBN 9781466835849 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Conversation. | BISAC: SELF-HELP / Personal Growth / Success.
Classification: LCC BJ2121 .L55 2016 | DDC 395.5/9—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016000034
e-ISBN 9781466835849
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First Edition: June 2016