On Sunday, awards season will conclude with the Oscars and a parade of shockingly skeletal Ozempified women in expensive custom designer gowns.
Their faces will have been pulled tight like a hotel bed sheet, and their lower cheeks carefully vacuumed out. It’s the new celebrity look: thin and thinner.
Faces are derivative and barely resemble the ones God gave them.
It feels like more than ever, that we are missing something important.
And no, it’s not an inch to pinch.
It’s the voice of the late Joan Rivers — and her unsparing honesty. Someone who’d poke fun, or at least call out, the bizarre celebrity shrinking.
The comedian, who died in 2014, fused her style expertise, sharp wit and searing commentary and turned red carpet reporting into an art form.
Rivers, who hosted E!’s “Fashion Police,” was so popular because she said what we all were thinking, only she was more raw and funnier by a mile.
But now our culture looks sick and generic, like it could use an infusion of Rivers’ candor to diagnose it.
Over the last few years, our usually thin celebrities have been disappearing into weight loss jab (GLP-1) vapors. Actresses like Emma Stone, Ariana Grande and her “Wicked” co-star Cynthia Erivo have become so thin, you could serve soup from their clavicle bones.
Then there’s Demi Moore. Two weeks ago, she attended the Gucci show at Milan Fashion Week, looking more like a praying mantis than a person. At the Actor Awards last week, her tiny frame could barely hold up an elaborate Schiaparelli gown.
Still, Extra TV claimed that she “dazzled.”
Rivers’ once healthy-looking E! co-star, Kelly Osbourne, has also become thin and fragile.
Yes, Rivers subscribed to the gospel of skinny. She regularly joked she’d had so much plastic surgery, she was going to donate her body to Tupperware.
But even in her own personal quest for some unattainable beauty standard, she never lost her self- awareness. And her clear vision of reality. And her humor? It could diffuse a nuclear bomb.
After her death 12 years ago, it became obvious that she was the last bulwark against the pernicious identity politics that had started to take root.
Suddenly every comment or joke was filtered through a racial, ethnic or gender lens and cultural commentators became cautious.
And fawning.
Just ask her E! co-star Giuliana Rancic, who joked in 2015 that Zendaya, who wore dreadlocks to the Oscars, that she looked like “she smells like patchouli oil — and weed.”
Zendaya, who is mixed race, called it “outrageously offensive.”
Rancic was forced to apologize and grovel. Her intent, which was not malicious, did not matter.
And so it became unacceptable to offer anything other than effusive praise to our privileged and primped celebrities.
Meanwhile, we saw bodies balloon under the phony body positivity movement, which became so unimpeachable, we had to pretend it was not only healthy, it was chic.
That sacred cow was slaughtered as soon as a pharmaceutical cheat code was introduced. It began with larger women like Lizzo, who claimed to have pride in her size until a quicker fix became available to jump-start weight loss.
It trickled into the proudly curvy class, and women like Amy Schumer and Meghan Trainor partook. Even though they built careers by defiantly not conforming to showbiz standards, they gladly took the slimming shot.
So much for authenticity.
Then it hit the thin girls, who seemed to be using it to drop those last pesky five pounds, you know, the ones that kept them from needing a winter coat in July.
Not that this crowd would cop to using it. But how else do we explain this spontaneous shedding of pounds?
While brings us to Osbourne, who sadly lost her father Ozzy in July. And both she and her mother Sharon have hit out at any comments about Kelly’s frail frame. She’s called them “disgusting” and “mean.”
They claim her severe weight loss is due to grief.
This isn’t just grief. This is likely a cluster of emotional issues and medical interventions. And most people are concerned, not just trolls.
But alas, we’ve been conditioned to believe we have to respect people, even when they’ve shrunk beyond a healthy size.
We’re just supposed to act like it’s all normal. And simply be kind. This is just another result of our society’s misplaced compassion.
Instead, come Sunday, many of these women will walk the red carpet, otherwise known as the gauntlet of sycophants. There, they’ll be affirmed and complimented.
And once they pass, people who want to keep their jobs will whisper to each other that something is seriously wrong.
When our dear Joan just would have said it out loud.
