Oscars are the apex of glitzy marketing

IN a world often too glum, in a world where scepticism is increasingly a plausible reaction to nearly any suggestion, we use escapism as a refuge. We use it as a safety valve so we might not, as Col Brandon threatened in Sense and Sensibility, run mad. 

We, very sensibly, occasionally wrap ourselves in fantasy so the grey, mundane day-to-day might not defeat us. We embrace this curative so enthusiastically that sometimes it’s hard to winnow the significant from the inane. This dependency has, with the collusion of social media, created a caste that would not have been recognised by Col Brandon when Jane Austen finished her razor sharp classic of human foible just over 200 years ago.

We have created the idea of celebrity and placed celebrities, no matter how vapid, on such high pedestals that historians may be as confused about them as we are today about the seven worlds, all close in size to Earth, identified around a small, faint star in the constellation Aquarius.