Jake Shane's If I Had Legs I'd Kick You Take Wasn't a Hit
The Cut· 475 words · 3 min read
Celebrities attending the Vanity Fair Oscars party on Sunday night could rest easy knowing they would not be subjected to any touchy questions about global politics or the depiction of race in One Battle After Another. What they might not have expected, however, was having to react politely as Jake Shane called the sick child at the center of If I Had Legs I'd Kick You "so annoying."
Shane was one of three influencers conducting celebrity interviews on the party's red carpet, bringing his signature fan energy to the night's proceedings alongside Quenlin Blackwell and Brittany Broski. While he was a fan of Mary Bronstein's film -- which earned Rose Byrne an Oscar nomination for her performance of a mother unraveling while dealing with her child's ARFID-esque illness -- Shane found the daughter to be kind of a buzzkill.
When Julia Fox came to chat with him and Blackwell, she was excited to talk about how If I Had Legs I'd Kick You was "every mother's story."
"Did you think the kid was annoying?" Shane asked her. Fox was not really onboard with his take, offering instead that the child "had issues" and that the movie has bigger things on its mind. "It's not that it's the mother's fault or the child's fault, it's society's fault. It sets mothers up to fail," Fox said. After learning about the ways in which the world is not "conducive to mothering," Shane came away with an important perspective: "Julia Fox for president!"
About an hour later, Shane tried again with Damson Idris, who was also a fan of Bronstein's harrowing film. When the F1 star told Shane and Blackwell that he loved the movie, the podcaster agreed but had to pose his signature question.
"Did you find the daughter so annoying?" Shane asked. Idris laughed politely, telling Shane, "I'm not gonna say that, but ..." The Therapuss host cut off the actor, saying, "You know it! She just went 'Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!' Shut the fuck up! Damn!" Idris deftly pivoted the conversation to how great of a year it was for movies.
As you can probably guess, the fact that Shane insisted on asking this question (twice!) was very unpopular online.
Others proposed that a professional red-carpet interviewer (and not someone who just fans out with A-listers on a podcast) wouldn't have made such a blunder.
To his credit, Shane recently pushed back on the idea that he is anything even remotely resembling a journalist. "I think it is insulting to journalists to say what I do is journalism," he told Rolling Stone over the weekend. "There are real journalists out there asking real, thoughtful, hard questions. What I am having with people is a conversation." And sometimes, I guess, a conversation can be, "Did you think that severely ill child was being kind of a drama queen?"