Hollywood is seeing fans pull a power play

HOLLYWOOD has always been full of Cinderella stories, so it wasn't exactly a shock to see Jennifer Hudson go from singing on a Disney cruise ship to showing up in a Vera Wang dress at the Golden Globes last week, where she took home a best supporting actress trophy. Now she's a shoo-in to wake up this morning with an Oscar nomination, quite a turnaround for someone who was ignominiously booted off "American Idol," with Simon Cowell telling her she was "out of her league."

If Hudson goes on to win a best supporting actress Oscar, it will be another landmark moment in the breakdown between our pop culture's major and minor leagues. If anything bridges the chasm between amateur and professional, between crass and class, it would be a performer bouncing from the raucous populism of "American Idol" to the solemn elitism of the Academy Awards.

Seen through the prism of what's happening on the Internet, "American Idol" is a classic example of user-generated content, being at its heart an event propelled by nonprofessional talent and a rabidly involved audience that has more of the shared community feeling of a Web phenomenon than a TV show.

Whether it's Hudson, lonelygirl15 or Jade Goody, the foul-mouthed ex-nurse who, thanks to her antics on "Celebrity Big Brother," is just as celebrated in England as Posh Spice, celebrity has been rudely down-marketed and democratized.

As Aaron Sorkin so eloquently put it the other day, complaining about the blogger influence on media coverage of his "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip" TV drama: "We live in the age of amateurs."

Sorkin may spend much of his show exploring the conflict between artists like himself and soulless media conglomerates, but in the new era of You Stardom, Sorkin and GE are in the same leaky boat. Just as the music industry saw its business crumble before its eyes as kids began sharing songs from unauthorized downloading services, media behemoths are scrambling to protect their content as it migrates to YouTube.com and other fan-driven video sites.

"Ultimately these big media companies are all wrestling with the same thing -- the power is being taken out of their hands," says Jordan Levin, the onetime WB network chief who now helps run Generate, a production and management firm active in Internet projects. "This is an industry that for its entire history has imposed its model on consumers. They've always said, 'We'll tell you when you'll watch our TV show or see our movie.' But that's fundamentally changing. The whole structure of people who control content is being supplanted by the content users themselves."