The Oscar Goes To Me! (Well Maybe One Day)

Going to sleep on Oscar night is like going to sleep on Christmas: you're happy because the event was wonderful, but you're sad because it means all the fun is over for another year. Oh, the Oscars. The illustrious Academy Awards. I have dreamt of walking down that gorgeous red carpet since before I even understood what the Oscars truly meant. All I knew was that the pretty people from TV got together for one big party on one night a year, and they'd wear the most beautiful dresses known to man. And when you're a five-year-old girl, parties and beautiful dresses are kind of a BIG DEAL.
Being at college these past couple of years during the Oscars has been great, but it just isn't the same as being at home and watching them with my mom. Yes, the mom I bicker with constantly, that one. Yet while we argue on so many things, the importance of the Academy Awards has never been one of them. I know it's because she loves the allure of it all just as much as I do. As a kid growing up, I truly and wholeheartedly believed for about thirteen years of my life that I was going to grow up and become a famous actress, that one day my mom would be sitting in our same living room, eating dinner and watching me win an award on the big screen (because apparently I wasn't nice enough to invite her to the Oscars with me in this fantasy).
I think, even now, a part of me wants that dream more than anything. I've always been in love with the bright lights and the rolling cameras and the fancy dresses and cocktail parties. I've wanted that beautiful, surreal Hollywood lifestyle longer than I've wanted any other thing out of life; it sounds so shallow to admit, the fact that fame and beauty have long been my #1 goals, but I think it's the most honest desire someone can have. Who doesn't want their five seconds in the limelight? I'll gladly take ten.
Anyway, watching the Awards at college is different than being at home. At home, I've never been distracted by a Twitter feed; I've never had to "unfollow" Perez Hilton because he takes up too much room with his million-and-one opinions. At home, watching the Awards with my mom was a ceremony. We would comment on dresses; we would make predictions for everything. We would gossip like little old women for that one night a year, a night when the idea of bickering with each other seemed completely foreign. I miss sitting in my dad's big blue chair, picturing myself on the carpet years into the future, imagining who I'd be wearing that night and what my speech would say if I won.
More specifically, I miss being young and immature. I miss being a dreamy little girl who could drift off to Hollywood in her mind, a place where it didn't cost anything to live and becoming famous was as simple as a wink and a smile. Oh, how I wish that were really true. In two years when I plan to fly to L.A. and stay for good, I'd love to think that a simple wink and a smile could pay my rent. But the city of angels isn't begging me to hurry up and head west, no writers or directors are dying to pay me millions of dollars to be in their movies, and those beautiful bright lights certainly aren't shining for me.
Yet at the same time, I'm not ready to give up the dream just yet. True, I'll probably never get my five seconds of fame, but I know I'll be just as satisfied standing behind the velvet rope. It's like the American dream on steroids, wanting to be famous; while few will obtain it, it's a dream millions of us have, and one that we admire too much to let go. Nights like this remind us girls (me, my mom, and all you women out there) that even though we're not the princess at the ball tonight, there are princesses out there, and they are having their moment in the spotlight. And that means we've still got a shot at it, too.