Los Angeles Times: “It was as a puckish media figure rather than as that ’employee’ that he attended Vanity Fair’s post-Oscar party and met Robert Altman — one of Rushdie’s proudest moments. ‘Late that night,’ Rushdie said, ‘I found him leaning against a bench at the side of the room, cradling his Academy Award. I sat down next to him and said hi. And I said, ‘Can I hold your Oscar?’ He said, ‘It’s bad luck, you know. . . . If you hold someone else’s Oscar you’ll never win your own.’ I said, ‘Give me the damn Oscar.’ So I held Bob’s Oscar. He died a few months later. It was the last time I’d seen him.'”
Write the other 481 reasons and you got yourself a book that I will gladly fork over 23.99 for. Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children excepted, is the most overrated writer of the last 30 years. I find him unreadable, his prose as pompous as he is.
“Overrated”, “unreadable”, “pompous”, yeah, Edward Y., you’ve totally nailed SR.
I don’t know the extent of Rushdie’s douchebaggery, but is this anecdote really supposed to illustrate it? Altman clearly suggests it’s bad luck for Rushdie to hold someone else’s Oscar, but he does it anyway because he doesn’t care about his own odds of winning one. One of his proudest moments is meeting Robert Altman on Oscar night, so that makes him a douche?
With two truly great novels under his belt (that would be “Midnight’s Children” and “Shame”), I don’t think Rushdie needs to worry about your spitballs, folks. I agree that his subsequent work has failed to match that one-two punch. But does he really deserve a flogging for palpating somebody else’s Oscar? It’s not a crime.
That curse is totally true, you know. When he was in his 40’s, my grandpa got to hold someone else’s Oscar. Fifty-three years later, he was dead.
I had the ‘honor’ of waiting on Rushdie once. He’s rude, smug, pushy, overbearing, misogynistic, AND a crap tipper. That all makes him a dbag as a person in my books. He’s mediocre at best as a writer. Doesn’t mean I think anyone should stab him. Just stop buying and reading his books like I did, maybe. BTW, I think demanding to hold someone’s Oscar who you just met that very night is what brings the dbaggery factor into this story. “Dude, if you want to smear your fingerprints all over an Oscar so badly, go win your own,” is what Altman might have said, if he’d ever had to wait a table for this guy.