Why We Should Stop Caring So Much About Celebrities

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I don’t like Kristen Stewart but it’s not for the reasons you might expect. Instead of hating on her for her recent infidelity with her Snow White & The Huntsman director, Rupert Sanders, or the fact that she always appears bored and stoned in interviews, I don’t like her based on the principle that she can’t act her way out of a dime bag. Seriously, her acting abilities are atrocious. Twilight was an obvious pass but her forays into more credible films have also left me thinking, “WHY DOES ANYONE HIRE THIS GIRL? SHE DOESN’T KNOW HOW TO SPEAK, LET ALONE CONVEY REAL EMOTION!” Reading her recent interviews in Vanity Fair and Interview have left me feeling doubly confused. When did we, as a culture, decide to treat Kristen Stewart as if she was the next Meryl Streep? Besides Panic Room, which was admittedly great, when has Kristen Stewart ever given a fantastic performance?

Actually, Kristen Stewart’s IRL personality is about the only thing I like about her. I’m obsessed with the fact that she is ALWAYS high on a red carpet and that she can’t articulate herself very well in interviews. She seems like an awkward stoner girl from the Valley, which I love because it’s so different than the usual robot glamazons Hollywood poops out to star in these blockbusters. Despite being the face of one the biggest movie franchises in America, Kristen Stewart has somehow managed to remain authentic and weird. I can only imagine the horror the Twilight producers experienced when they sent her to PR camp and she came back acting exactly the same. Ha ha!

Growing up, I used to LOVE celebrity scandals. In high school, I had not one but two subscriptions to Us Weekly — one for me and one for my friends, natch — and  I scoured websites like Oh No They Didn’t a few times a day for the latest gossip. In the last few years, however, my interest in tabloid culture has waned. I stopped reading magazines like Us Weekly altogether and will now only occasionally check a gossip blog. What exactly changed? Well, for one thing, celebrities cleaned up their act and became boring. I was fortunate to come of age in the golden era of celeb meltdowns (2005-2007) and got to witness such amazing events as the Paris Hilton/Brandon Davis “Firecrotch” scandal, Britney’s meltdown, and Nicole Richie’s painkiller-induced joyride on the wrong side of the freeway. It seemed like every week a new celebrity was getting into trouble and, while it was disturbing to watch, I can’t lie and say it wasn’t entertaining. Now, besides Paris and Lindsay, the bad girls have grown up and in their place have come stars like Taylor Swift and Selena Gomez — girls who wouldn’t DARE shave their head in a Tarzana strip mall. Miley Cyrus is the closest we’ve got to a bad girl and the worst crime she’s committed so far is being a stoner and forgetting to wear a bra. (I’m not counting Demi Lovato in all of this because her problems are just too #dark to even revel in.)

But beyond there being a general lack of salacious celebrity fodder today, I’ve lost interest in the drama simply because I stopped caring. When I found out that Kristen Stewart had cheated on Robert Pattinson, my knee-jerk response was, “So?” I mean, who gives a crap what Kristen Stewart puts in her mouth, unless it’s a joint — in which case, hey girl hey! Being fixated on the lives of people you don’t know seems bizarre and immature to me now. It’s like the people who legitimately have a crush on Ryan Gosling and have a picture of him as their screensaver. Like, I agree the dude is hot but this isn’t junior high. Instead of spending all day looking at pictures of him, just go to a bar and have sex with an uglier version of him! You’re not a teenager anymore. You can try to bang as many hot dudes as you want! FREEDUMB.

Don’t get me wrong, I still have certain celebrities that I will always delight in. Mary-Kate Olsen, Mischa Barton, Lindsay Lohan, Miley Cyrys, Courtney Love, TARYN MANNING, all the Real Housewives: your shenanigans provide me with so much joy. But everyone else? Go do drugs, make out, fall down in public. I don’t care. I’ve got my own making out, drug-taking, and public spills to make anyway.

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