Dear Gossips,
Cannes starts next week, the first full-fledged festival they’ve held since 2019. There will be business deals, there will be fashion, and celebrities being at it again, but mostly, there will beTop Gun. Aspreviously announced,Top Gun: Maverickwill have a premiere on the Croisette. Now, though, we’ve seen Tom Cruise’schopper arrival, and we’ve seen Lady Gaga’s drone dress (which is not from the premiere ofMaverick, but from her Art Pop tour).
Like most things post-pandemic—which we are still very much in except for how everyone in various governments and media apparatuses keep acting like we’re not—I expect Cannes 2022 to be completely unhinged. No one is doing well, the last two years have broken all our brains, and anyone insisting they’re fine and they “got through it” is either completely demented and in deep denial about it, or their skeleton is in control and trying to sow discord before the bone wars start up sometime in the near future. Cannes has always been a little bit out there, its identity equal parts Big Fashion and Celebrity Moments and long-running business affair, but now it feels like the vibe is right for the Fashion and the Moments to overtake the business, at least for a little while.
We were promised a “Roaring Twenties” style debauch, but all the 2020s have brought us so far is mass death, mass suffering, and diminishing human rights. The LEAST this dumb decade can do for us is give us Tom Cruise and Lady Gaga having a techno-fashion fight at Cannes. I’m talking full stunting, I want chaos, I want drama, I want Tom Cruise and Lady Gaga to commit so hard to their respective bits that someone cracks a tooth from the power of their smizing. Give us absurdity, give us anarchy, crash a speedboat onto the Croisette, parachute onto the red carpet, wear a drone dress armed with confetti canons, just BRING US THE UNIQUE JOY OF SILLY CELEBRITIES DOING SILLY CELEBRITY SH-T.
For the next two weeks, I hope celebrities take a break from selling us cryptocurrency to give us good old-fashioned glamor and escapism. If anyone can deliver this to us, it’s the combined power of Tom Cruise and Lady Gaga, two celebrities who both know their own power and place in the celebrity ecosphere and love the f-ck out of insane stunts. I hope they both come loaded for bear, committed to maximum stunting. I hope their entrance onto the Croisette is so bonkers it could launch Skynet with their combined tech specs. We can get back to recriminations and somber reasonings about The State of Things later. For two weeks, at least, let us have the glitz and the distraction and thefunwe’ve been missing for two years.
Live long and gossip,
Sarah
