I really do love Neil Gaiman's work, and since I spent my free time last weekend re-reading a big chunk of Sandman, that love is particularly fresh in my mind. But his "nobody's guide to the Oscars" is really a little irritating.
I ask Deette who's inside the dress, and she tells me it's Rachel McAdams. I want to say hello – Rachel's said nice things about me in interviews – but she's working right now. I'm not. No one wants to take my photo, or, Deette discovers, to interview me. I'm invisible....I walk over to the stairs. A nice young man in a suit asks me for my ticket. I show it to him. He explains that, as a resident of the first mezzanine, I am not permitted to walk downstairs and potentially bother the A-list. I am outraged. I am not actually outraged, but I am a bit bored, and I have friends downstairs.All the complaining about seats, and being invisible might have been sort of charming if told with an actual sense of wonder, by someone who isn't a Very Big Deal in the universe he mostly inhabits. The idea that Very Big Dealism ought to translate into all dimensions may be something that's generally true if you're Dream of the Endless. But Gaiman's written enough about the laws of universes to know that you've got to learn them all and obey them if you want to get by, and that power in one realm doesn't entitle you to preeminence in another. Besides, isn't being a graphic novels badass enough?