Elliott Smith
If you were watching last Saturday, if you hadn’t left your chair to order pizza for the Utah-North Carolina game, you saw that shot go up and then fall harmlessly to the floor. I couldn’t help but wonder if this man’s big opportunity wasn’t likely to haunt him forever after. How many hours’ sleep would he sacrifice replaying the shot in his head? What if he’d bounced the ball six times instead of five? What if he’d cocked his wrist a split second earlier? Should he have thrown it underhand, Barry style? Gillette did give him $50,000 just for being there; that should buy back some of his sleep.
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Elliott Smith is Everyboy. He’s the kid who dropped out of Columbia College and works at Starbucks, or the kid who noodles on his guitar for hours on end, watching TV with the sound off. It’s preposterous enough that he was given the opportunity to play on an awards show for an audience that probably outnumbered his previous largest by–generously–999,998,000. But for that show to have been the Oscars and not, for instance, the Grammys makes it downright surreal. Only five songs are nominated for Oscars each year, most of them written by people like Diane Warren, the one-woman Hollywood hit factory responsible for such melodramatic pap as Up Close & Personal’s “Because You Loved Me.” At best they’re overcooked turkeys by old rockers gone soft, like Randy Newman or Bruce Springsteen.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Elliot Smith TV photo by Randy Tunnell.
