Class of 2010 Summary

2010 Academy Graduates 

Academy Awards 2010 Highlights

Remarks from 2010 Outstanding Alumni Award Recipient, Chris Shinn

Thank you Michael and Mitzi and Jonathan for your very nice words, and everyone at the Academy who was a part of bringing me this very special honor.
           
Being back here makes me think of my own graduation seventeen years ago. Naturally one thinks about how things have changed. Back then, if you wanted to be seen on screen,  you had to get hired by a major television or motion picture company.  If you wanted people to read what you wrote, you'd have to find a book or magazine publisher.  If you wanted a lot of people to hear your music, you needed a record deal. 
           
Today none of those things is true. You can make your own video series and put it on Youtube. You can publish your fiction and poetry on a personal blog, and you can put your band's music on Myspace. 

So what do all these changes mean to you guys who are graduating today?

The first thing I think it's important to say is that this democratization of the arts wasn't done from the ground up – it was done by huge corporations who discovered that the hunger for fame could make them lots of money. When I was a kid, there was a TV show called Fame about kids who wanted to be famous; today there are dozens of TV shows that actually claim to be able to give people fame.  But by now those are old news... Simon Cowell is leaving American Idol and Justin Bieber didn't need to go on it to become famous, he just put his videos up on Youtube. That's how fast things change. 
           
But however quickly things are changing, one thing is constant: big companies believe they can make big money by exploiting how badly people want to be famous. Now on the one hand that's depressing, because it means a lot more untalented people are being made famous.  In fact there's now a whole new class of celebrities who are simply famous for being famous. Those of us who want to be recognized for doing something meaningful might not feel too good about these trends. But like in a Greek tragedy, the huge corporations who believe they've found a way to turn the human desire for fame into a commodity may actually be bringing the traditional concept of fame to its deathbed. Andy Warhol said that in the future everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes – what I don't think he said is that if everyone is famous, then no one is.  And that's where I see an amazing opportunity for the graduating students here.
           
As fame lessens in importance because so many people achieve some measure of it, it moves down the list of reasons we do what we do. And naturally, what rises in its place is the desire to communicate one's self to the world – the very skill one learns here at the Academy. 
           
I don't remember any focus in my time at the Academy on success. What I remember is that I got to explore what was inside me and how to most effectively articulate it to an audience. This focus on the inner world allowed me to get to know myself and to trust that what was inside me wasn't weird or wrong or bad but instead was something worth exploring, cultivating, and sharing with others. When I got out into the world I saw that this was a very rare gift to carry. Not everyone had this feeling that what was inside of them had a legitimacy that, if expressed artfully, could touch people in profound ways.
           
I got lucky – I was able to be myself and still find some measure of success. But I know I'm speaking for many successful people when I say that my success was somewhat arbitrary. My first play, Four, was rejected by every theatre in America before it was produced at the Royal Court in London. And it was just one man who read the play, picked it out of the slush pile. What if it had gotten lost in the mail? Or what if he'd had a bad day that day and just not read more than a few pages before tossing it aside?
           
Today there are more doors to success. When I entered the professional world over a decade ago now, there were still relatively few routes to fame and recognition, and most people who achieved it played by the rules the power brokers had set up – you got to be famous by fitting in to the preexisting molds that had proven profitable over time. What's exciting about today is that there are a lot more ways in – a lot more doors that open onto opportunity. Many of those doors you can build yourself, and even open yourself. And when you can make your own opportunities, you don't have to worry about fitting in to someone else's idea of what you should be. You may not get to be as famous or as rich in today's world as you might have gotten ten or twenty years ago – but the upside is, you have a much bigger chance to be yourself. And I think that's the deepest desire of every artist... even those who think they only want to be rich and famous.  That desire to be myself is the desire this school told me was okay.  Not in a self-indulgent way in which I was amazing and everything inside of me fascinating – but rather, in a way that communicated to me that what was inside me was valuable, worth investigating and exploring and learning about, and worth taking the time to learn to articulate. 
           
I don't want to make it sound like it'll be simple for you graduating students here – getting people to pay attention to something deep you want to communicate is never going to be as easy as titillating people in a superficial way. But there is no doubt in my mind that should you chose to, you will have an easier time making meaningful work available to audiences than at any other time in human history.  And what that means is that the greatest resistance you may face won't be from the power brokers in the  entertainment industry – it will be from  yourselves. It can be scary to look at yourself and explore what's inside of you. So the challenges remain. But those are challenges  you've been prepared for.  I thank God for the great teachers I had here, who gave me a sense of self that I've carried through the dark and difficult times in my career and life – which aren't over, by the way.  And I thank God you guys had these teachers – many of them the same ones I had – prepare you to turn your training into self-created communications with the world.  I urge you to honor the training the Academy has provided you as you transition into the bigger world – a world also in transition -- that awaits you. 
           
Thank you again for this tremendous honor.