Internet personality Jake Shane is facing heat online for his questionable approach to interviewing celebrities on the Vanity Fair Oscars Party red carpet.
Shane, 26, was hired alongside fellow influencers Quen Blackwell and Brittany Broski to host red carpet coverage at the glamorous celebration following Sunday’s 98th Academy Awards ceremony.
As the internet comedians took turns interviewing A-listers on the outlet’s livestream, Shane caught the attention of several critics on social media with a few awkward celebrity encounters — two of which were soured by his questions about Oscar-nominated movie If I Had Legs I’d Kick You.
Mary Bronstein’s drama earned Rose Byrne her first Oscar nomination for portraying an exhausted mother attempting to care for her potentially terminally ill daughter — but when actors Julia Fox and Damson Idris each brought up their love for the movie to Shane in two separate interviews, his first question to each of the stars was whether they found the sick child “so annoying.”
“You know that kid was so damn annoying,” Shane said to Fox, a single mom to a five-year-old son, who had just finished saying that the movie was “every mother’s story.”
Fox shyly disagreed before saying to Shane and Blackwell: “She had issues. Can I tell you something? It’s not that it’s the mother’s fault or the child’s, it is society’s fault. It sets mothers up to fail.”
Idris’s interaction with Shane consisted of the F1 actor declining to comment as he laughed uncomfortably, before Shane interjected again to say: “You know it! Mommy, mommy, mommy! Shut the f*** up, damn!”
Videos of Shane’s conversations with Idris and Fox immediately began to circulate on X and TikTok, launching criticisms of the comedian that prompted a comment piece from Variety.
“Shane’s repeated denigration of the film If I Had Legs I’d Kick You struck a strange and discordant note,” Variety’s chief correspondent Daniel D’Addario wrote in a column published Tuesday. Representatives for Shane did not respond for further comment.
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“[Fox] really knows how to put things into perspective,” one person wrote on X, adding, “[Shane’s] comment definitely missed the point.”
Another person wrote on X, “Jake Shane was trying to be glib and fell on his face. I pulled the same schtick early in my career. You can be snarky, but you always have to be genuine. If you’re not, everyone will see through you. Hopefully this will be a learning experience for him.”
Others on social media took the moment as an opportunity to weigh in on the discourse about the future of journalists being replaced by influencers at red carpet events — an issue Shane recently addressed by saying that it was “insulting” to compare his work to journalism.
“I didn’t go to school for journalism,” he told Rolling Stone in a video interview posted Saturday. “There are real journalists out there asking real, thoughtful, hard questions.”
He added, “What I am having with people is a conversation. You can say that’s journalism but it’s not hard-hitting.”