Everyone Was Famous and I Was Eating Canapés

The Bambi is Germany’s preeminent entertainment award—an annual ceremony in Berlin where the media industry assembles to hand itself trophies and discuss, between drinks, the death of the media industry. I’d spent years being mildly contemptuous of the whole exercise, the comfortable contempt of someone who was never invited.

Then I was invited. I dug through my wardrobe for something that wasn’t a band T-shirt.

The formula holds whether you’re watching from a couch or standing in the room. Celebrities navigate the red carpet. Lifetime achievement awards go to whoever had the evening free. Lisa and Lena—Germany’s Instagram twins, famous on every platform simultaneously before most of their audience had finished school—are there, looking exactly like their feed. Dagi Bee, one of Germany’s first genuine YouTube celebrities, works the room with the ease of someone who’s been practicing this for years. Dua Lipa is present, impeccable, visibly somewhere else in her head. And in the mix there are YouTubers who all look like Ukrainian Justin Bieber clones, grinning into phones held by crotch-damp teenagers making hand signs nobody outside their demographic can decode.

Afterparty: someone keeps my glass full. Models, directors, and people with old money discuss the death of television between canapés. A too-smooth manager materializes beside me, makes an extremely confident case that she can make me famous, and is very certain of this despite having known me for approximately ninety seconds. I smile, take another drink, make sure I never give her my real number.

Out of the hotel early the next morning. The Bambi looks exactly like it does on TV. It always does.