A lot has been written today about about Sandra Bullock’s abandonment in the face of her Oscar by her deadbeat husband (including in this brilliant piece by the great Nicole LaPorte here). As has been noted, abandonment of female Oscar winners is a long and venerable tradition in Hollywood with a legacy dating at least back to Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman.
And almost as venerable is the tradition of shaking an angry finger at those resentful, jealous, no good husbands who can’t take the thought of having a successful wife in the house.
What these scoldings miss out, the element we as a nation are forgetting in this debate, is the absolute horror it must be to live with an Oscar winning actor, male or female.
It is a well-established fact of science that artists are insane. There was a study somewhere that I once wrote an article about but which I can’t track down now that showed something like 90 percent of artists suffer from some form of mental illness. The craziest class of artists is poets, of whom nearly 100 percent should be under doctor’s care, according to this study (I swear I’m not making it up.) But poets are closely followed by actors, whose incidence of mental illness is also nearly universal. Anecdotally, I can certainly attest, having grown up in and around the industry, I can not recall meeting an actor who was not mentally ill.
