Another week and the smell of another celebrity cooking show permeates the air. Gavin Rossdale, of 90s grunge-adjacent, arena-stuffing band Bush, is the latest star to turn to cookery, with Deadline reporting that he is to launch a cooking and entertainment show called E.A.T. In it, he will talk to celebrity guests, including Tom Jones, at his house in the Hollywood Hills, while designing, preparing and making them a three-course meal.
He is part of a broader picture of celebrities widening their repertoires and his is not the first celebrity-to-chef shift of recent times. Those who follow such news will be familiar with Brooklyn Beckham’s move from photography to cookery, Cookin’ With Brooklyn, a social media series presumably conceived of as rhyme first, content later, in which Beckham describes making a sandwich, but confuses slices of bread with loaves. (Unless he really does put fish between two loaves of bread. Maybe that’s the twist.) Selena Gomez learns to cook on Selena + Chef, which is like a high-end version of that bit on Sunday Brunch where soap stars chuck flour in a bowl and pretend to enjoy baking. Sadly, Paris Hilton’s Netflix show, Cooking With Paris, has not been renewed for a second series, despite being a work of genuine high art.
In an era of fame for fame’s sake, it gets harder and harder to work out what most celebrities do. Famous people now insist on doing a bit of everything, even interviewing other famous people, a format beloved of pivot-to-podcast celebrities, though it rarely pays off; with a handful of exceptions, it’s far too cosy and polite. Travel shows used to be fronted by professional travellers or explorers. Now, any comedian who’s done 15 minutes on Live at the Apollo gets given a camper van and a GoPro.
The problem with this celebrity vogue for cooking – and travel shows, podcasts and so on – is that I’d still rather watch actual chefs in the kitchen, using their years of training and expertise to explain how to do something. (Gomez gets a pass, because she’s more student than cook.) I know it’s old-fashioned, in these post-expert times, to value skill over personality, but cookery isn’t even a field that’s lacking in personalities. I have no idea if Rossdale can cook and perhaps the show will reveal that he’s the René Redzepi/David Frost hybrid we’ve all been waiting for. However, the idea that cooking is in dire need of special celebrity sparkle is as daft as making a sandwich with two loaves of bread.
Academy Awards: and the Oscar for best voter goes to Twitter
We are mid-awards season and award ceremonies are still being reformed, revised and polished up. Some have taken categories that were previously divided by gender and removed gender from consideration, which did not stop women winning the bulk of the awards at the Brits a couple of weeks ago, or from dominating the Berlin film festival, which gave its Golden Bear to Alcarràs, directed by Carla Simón.
The Oscars, shunted to the end of March, remain the grande dame of the season, haughtily adjusting her bosom as the young ’uns play havoc at her feet. But it has famously struggled to find its identity in recent years and ratings have fallen away. It seems as tough to recruit a presenter as it is to find anyone who is up for replacing Laura Kuenssberg, but this year the ceremony has opted for three presenters: Wanda Sykes, Amy Schumer and Regina Hall. It will be the first time that three women have hosted and hopefully it will resemble the heady days of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler’s reign at the now less-appealing Golden Globes.
In the spirit of reform, the Oscars have also added a sort of people’s choice moment, allowing Twitter users to vote for their favourite film of 2021, regardless of its nomination status, by tweeting #OscarsFanFavorite. This will then be “recognised” during the ceremony, though that sounds like it’s being held at a careful arm’s length – will it get a chocolate Oscar instead? I can’t imagine that there will be any problems at all, whatsoever, no way, with using a Twitter hashtag as a voting device.
Taylor Swift: Glastonbury will probably get over her absence
In 2019, Taylor Swift tweeted that she was “ecstatic” to announce that she would be headlining Glastonbury on its 50th birthday. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but it has been an eventful couple of years and while all fingers are crossed that the festival will go ahead this summer for the first time since 2019, rumours have emerged suggesting that Swift will not be rolling over her booking. In other words, she is not feeling ’22.
Right now, Billie Eilish is confirmed as the headliner on Friday night and, it’s rumoured, Kendrick Lamar on Sunday night, leaving one main slot to fill. But the beauty of Glastonbury, above almost every other festival, is that it hardly matters who is playing at all. It’s so vast that you’re as likely to spend an unknowable amount of time trying to find your way out of the gong bath section as you are making sure you see an act that seemed essential when the tickets arrived. I would love to see Swift at Glastonbury. She is an exquisite performer with a decade of hits to her name. Hopefully, it will still happen, at some point, but I am sure this year’s crowd will, forgive me, shake it off.
• Rebecca Nicholson is an Observer columnist
