Photo by Kevin Harber
The 35th annual Kennedy Center Honors are on Sunday night, and chances are, you’re not going. Don’t worry, you can watch an edited-down version of the festivities next month. But in case you’re curious about what’s going down on the swankiest night on Washington’s cultural calendar, here are a few items to refresh your memory.
1. The Honorees
This years crop of honorees is quite the haul, featuring Dustin Hoffmann, David Letterman, Buddy Guy, Natalia Makarova and the surviving members of Led Zeppelin (R.I.P. John Bonham.) All are fine entertainers whose careers surely merit inclusion in the Kennedy Center’s annals of “Hey, we had these people over for a party!”
Letterman, Guy, Makarova and Zeppelin are all subjects of lengthy profiles in The Washington Post this weekend. In fact, you’ll find nary a critical word about the Kennedy Center Honors in the Post, which every year commits this exercise in cultural sycophancy. (See past gushing on Meryl Streep, Neil Diamond and Yo-Yo Ma. Great artists all, but the editorial fawning seems so approved by the folks down at 2700 F Street.)
Actually, Chris Richards’ feature on Robert Plant, Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones is quite good at reminding readers why Led Zeppelin is the hardest band the U.K. ever produced, while Sarah Kaufman’s look back at Marakova’s career is a solid primer on an honoree who is a bit less familiar than the others.
But then there are items like Ann Hornaday’s portrait of Hoffman. Of one of his most memorable roles, she writes:
But Midnight Cowboy turned out to be another hit, earning Hoffman his second Oscar nomination and cementing his standing as a bona fide movie star, one who virtually single-handedly redefined what a leading man in the movies could look and sound like.
Great performance by a great actor in a great film? Sure. But did Hoffman single-handedly define the term “leading man”? There were plenty of other unconventional stars on the rise with Hoffman; surely Al Pacino and Gene Hackman did as much for the common schlub.
2. The Tickets
Did we mention the Kennedy Center Honors are super-fancy and you’re probably not going in person? Of the 2,100 seats in the center’s Opera House, only 300 are released to the general public, and then only at prices beginning at $400. After a block of tickets reserved for CBS and another chunk set aside for the honored guests, the rest are how the Kennedy Center gets a nice fat payday.
The Post’s Paul Farhi writes that most of the tickets are given to the Kennedy Center’s top donors—corporate foundations, well-placed executives, and other moneyed interests. But why, then, are the Opera House’s seats so full of members of Congress, Supreme Court justices and other public dignitaries who are photographed hobnobbing with the richies? Public officials are supposed to avoid taking such lavish gifts, right? Farhi writes:
In a kind of classic Washington two-step, corporations, foundations and individuals who contribute to the Kennedy Center each year buy Honors tickets and then donate some of them back to the institution, creating a pool of giveaways.
The Kennedy Center can then distribute these tickets to the VIPs of its choosing without skirting the “gift” rules.
So, if you see the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee yukking it up with some suit from Northrop Grumman, remember, the chairman officially got the ticket from the Kennedy Center. They think of everything in this town.
3. Cultural Diversity, or Lack Thereof
No one should doubt the artistic achievements of Hoffman, Guy, Letterman, Marakova or the fellows from Led Zeppelin. In the 35 years that the Kennedy Center has been fêting the world’s great performers, its choices have been mostly unobjectionable. But in one area it has failed miserably.
Only twice, and both in the past decade, have the Kennedy Center Honors included a Latino artist. The first time was in 2000, when the Spanish tenor Placido Domingo made the cut. The actress Chita Rivera was included in 2002, but since then, zilch. After this year’s awardees were unveiled, Felix Sanchez, who runs the National Hispanic Leadership Agenda, called the continued exclusion of Latino artists “unacceptable.”
Sanchez called Michael Kaiser, the Kennedy Center’s sometimes voluble president, to complain, and offer a few suggestions as to how to make the annual ceremony a bit more multi-chromatic. Among Sanchez’ suggestions were Rita Moreno, Joan Baez, Carlos Santana, Gloria Estefan and Edward James Olmos.
Kaiser’s response, reportedly: “Go fuck yourself.”
The Kennedy Center Honors will be broadcast December 26 on CBS.
