Evan Rachel Wood's Awkward Acceptance of the 2009 Young Hollywood Superstar Award

The Hollywood Life 11th Annual Young Hollywood Awards took place in Santa Monica, California on Sunday, June 7, 2009. During this award ceremony, Evan Rachel Wood was given the Superstar award, riding on her critically acclaimed performance in The Wrestler.

But things did not go as smoothly that evening as Evan perhaps would have wanted. In fact, from beginning to end, it was cringy awkward.

Let's take a look:

 

 

Here is what I find so awkward about the whole thing:

1. Patricia Clarkson presents the award (she played Evan's mother in Whatever Works, which had premiered the night before this award ceremony), and when describing Evan, she calls her, among other things, "cunning". A cunning person is one who uses deceit to achieve an end. I'm sure Patricia meant this to describe something positive, but it just sounds awkward to use a word like that to describe someone you are trying to praise. Further along, she will also describe Evan as "nutty", which isn't necessarily negative, but it does make her sound a bit crazy.

2. Patricia Clarkson also mentions that Evan will be in the upcoming film adaptation of Philip Roth's American Pastoral. However, this movie did not come out till 2016, seven years after this award ceremony. I'm sure there was probably some sort of production issue, but when considering the facts, it comes off as somewhat awkward.

3. When Evan comes up to receive the award, she does it with a playful yet awkward strut. Makes me wonder if she did it as a reaction to the "nutty" comment.

4. After Evan takes the weapon-looking award from Patricia, which Evan comments on, she immediately retorts to Patricia: "I don't know if I 'm as nutty as you."

5. Evan then corrects Patricia by saying that she has been an actress for 16 years, not 15 as previously stated.

6. Evan calls her 16 year acting career: "The best and worst time."

7. She speaks of her life in Hollywood as Peter Pan-like where you don't ever have to grow up and you get to "play make-believe".

8. We then come to the most awkward moment, when she says the following about being an actor: "It's the greatest job in the world, but it's also the hardest, so if I had anything to say to young Hollywood, it would be don't be an actor if you want to be, be an actor because you have to be, because it's also just the hardest thing in the world, and there's many sacrifices, but it's all been worth it, and I don't regret anything."

9. Then after concluding her remarks, and giving her typical awkward laugh, Patricia comes to escort her off the stage, but Evan goes in to kiss her as Patricia is looking down, obviously not expecting it, which looks as if she kissed her on the side of her forehead.

10. On three different occasions in her speech, Evan awkwardly rubbed her ear lobes, which I guess could mean one of a number of things.

Here is what was going on behind the scenes in Evan's life at the time:

1. Even though in Phoenix Rising Evan makes it sound as if she was locked away in a dungeon in Manson's house in June of 2009, in reality Manson and Evan had not been together since April of 2009. The summer of 2009 was what I consider Evan's most wild time. She was not in a relationship, so she was being described in the media as someone who was really enjoying being single, which consisted of a lot of late-night partying, drugs and hook-ups. At this time, beginning just days earlier, she was spending a lot of time with Shane West, even touring with him in California and Las Vegas.

2. While Evan was with Manson, she was getting a lot of bad press. According to Evan at the time, this was the most stressful time of her life for the way she was being treated by the press. It was also stressful for her because she was trying to transition from a child actress to an adult actress, but all the press could concentrate on was how young she was next to Manson and how she was now acting like a wild child of Hollywood.

3. Just before this, in May of 2009, Evan finally got together and made peace with her dad after many years, even starring in a play with him in North Carolina. Her relationship with her father is described by her as probably the most painful part of her life to that point.

4. In 2010, Evan described the year she and Manson were not together in 2009 as follows: "We spent a year apart, and I think that year was incredibly important. No matter who I was with, nothing came close ... nothing ... and I missed him everyday."

5. Meanwhile, she was also constantly busy with new acting roles and promoting new releases.

Concluding Remarks:

When Evan received the Young Hollywood Superstar Award on June 7th 2009, she appears to not be in a right state of mind. She looks like she has been partying and doing drugs more than usual, reflecting a lot about her childhood, seeming a bit cynical of Hollywood and is just all around lost and exhausted. Years later, she will blame all these feelings and troubles on Marilyn Manson. In reality, it seems like Manson was the most stable and good part of her life at the time, which explains why she went back to him after spending a difficult year apart, and accepting his proposal for marriage. But this wasn't the answer for Evan. Her issues were not about Marilyn Manson making things better for her. She had much deeper problems, and these problems would progressively get worse before they got better, and then worse again. Many attempts would be made to bring stability to her life, but till this day she keeps getting caught in the vicious cycle which I believe will wind up becoming a downward spiral unless she really starts being an honest and responsible adult who does not blame others for the decisions of her life. Till this day Evan doesn't understand that being a successful actress is not the most difficult job in the world. Far from it, in fact. These days she adds that being a single mother is the most difficult job in the world, putting most of the blame for that on her ex-partner Jaime Bell. For Evan, everything in her life is more difficult than for everybody else. She is a perpetual victim who is always misunderstood, and because of this she claims to understand other misunderstood victims and wants to be their savior. More and more, for Evan everything revolves around Evan, and she wants to be in control of every aspect of her life or else she has a meltdown. We see all this in its beginning stages at the 2009 Young Hollywood Awards.