Red carpet ridiculousness is only 20 years old

Still not caring about new movies, given their track record, I didn't bother going somewhere to see the Oscars. But curious nevertheless about the award ceremony as a sign of the times, I went over to TMZ and found a nice gallery of red carpet fashion disasters of the past.

We are constantly told how the 1980s were the "decade of excess," but all those claims ever amount to are that people used to grow fuller and longer hair and wear colorful clothes. Flipping through TMZ's look back at over-the-top stupidity on the red carpet, we see the truth that it's almost exclusively a feature of the '90s and 2000s.

Someone should do the same thing for the MTV Video Music Awards, where attendees are given wider freedom to dress however provocatively they want, and where they have less sober preferences. I've only watched a handful of them, but I distinctly remember the 1998 ones where Rose Mcgowan really trashed it up, accompanied by fellow attention whore Marilyn Manson no less.

[Googling...] Hold on, Us Magazine put together a list of the worst VMA looks of all time, and whaddaya know, they're all from the '90s and 2000s, even though the award show began back in 1984. I was too young to be into it at that time, but I do recall seeing much later on Madonna's performance of "Like a Virgin." About the only excessive thing she wore was her "BOY TOY" belt over her wedding dress. Nothing else stands out as attention-whoring about the '80s shows, or even the ones I saw in the early '90s. The first one I recall was sometime in the mid-'90s when uber-skank Courtney Love began lobbing a bunch of junk up at the pre-show hosts just so she'd get noticed. After they invited her up to their set, she made a complete jackass out of herself (she didn't have to try hard).

I didn't think of it earlier, but the appearance and behavior of people at award ceremonies is just another example of the impossibility of sympathy in the culture of the past 15 to 20 years, where everyone strives to wear a kabuki mask rather than look and act like a real human being.