It’s a sort of mise en abyme, really, this curious fact about the Academy Awards telecast: it has won a huge number of Emmys—54, with 293 nominations overall—since the television awards themselves were inaugurated in 1949. Mise en abyme (literally, “placed in the abyss”) being the French expression that best encapsulates the vertiginous sensation one has when the world recedes into infinite and self-reflective copies of itself—a workaday version of which would be the queasiness one feels sitting in a restaurant booth that has mirrors on either side, such that you see receding copies of yourself chowing down ad infinitum, and by extension ad nauseam.
However, I don’t think it sickened Hollywood—understood metonymically—to see itself reflected in the infinitely receding mirrors of the nation’s television screens. Rather, the fact that the industry’s own festival of self-congratulation should, in turn, be endorsed by anything up to 55 million viewers only confirmed
