At least they didn't say it was more important than 9/11 or the Civil Rights Movement

I talked yesterday about how most of LA was getting back to normal but how the demographics of the fires (or more accurately, of one of the fires) fed the perception of the whole town lying in smouldering ruins.

The second piece of information you need in order to understand how this story has been reported is that one of the two major fires, the Palisades Fire seemed to target the richest and most famous people in Southern California. This is not entirely a coincidence. Wealthy celebrities are attracted to the spectacular views and relative isolation found in the Santa Monica Mountains. People like Ben Affleck pay a considerable premium to live in these beautiful tinder bundles. The median home price for Pacific Palisades is somewhere around $4 million and the outliers raise the mean considerably.

Many, perhaps even most of the Hollywood's elites were either in or adjacent to the Palisades Fire. These people tend to take themselves and their problems very seriously in the best of times. You can imagine how they react to an actual conflagration.

 [Emphasis added]

How the 2025 Oscars Could Save Los Angeles (and Themselves) by Steven Zeitchik

How in the midst of the wildfires‘ unfathomable tragedies, [awards shows] could heal our soul like Barbra Streisand at the Emmys after Sept. 11, or unify our disparateness like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s posthumous win did at the Grammys in 1971, or even channel our rage like Michael Moore at the Oscars at the start of the 2003 Iraq War.

A well-designed Academy Awards on March 2, with some tasteful tributes from victims and a no doubt powerful acceptance speech or two, would be exactly what Los Angeles and the country need — the national Thanksgiving dinner that, at their best, awards shows can manage to be.  

...

The Academy has just said that the Oscars will continue as planned but without some of the run-up glitz, like the Nominees Luncheon (and amid several Academy governors losing their homes in the fires). It’s clear they’re still figuring out the shape and tone of this year’s show. But if they were simply to go forward with the usual list of presenters and acceptances under more somber lights and some time roped off for a tribute, it would feel … not exactly tone-deaf, but certainly like a missed opportunity.

 Brief side note. The combined death toll of the widely covered Palisades Fire and the far deadlier Eaton Fire (not a lot of movie stars in Altadena) is currently 25. In 2018, 86 people died in the Camp Fire. As far as I can tell, no one at the Academy at the time mentioned the need for a national day of healing.