Offerings #7: "A-Lister" is an Altar Boys Anthem

The newsletter has returned because the savant and voice of a generation, Romy Mars, released a new single that concerns Altar Boys.

For those unfamiliar, Romy is the daughter of Sofia Coppola and Phoenix frontman Thomas Mars. She first went viral on TikTok in 2023 for posting a chaotic video making vodka pasta where she explained that she was grounded for trying to charter a plane on her dad’s credit card to get dinner with a camp friend. The video was her ultimate revenge because her parents forbid her from having a public social media presence. She deleted the video, but returned to TikTok in 2024 to solidify herself as a new kind of nepo baby and launch a music career. 

Titled “A-Lister” with a music video directed by her mom, the song imagines a fraught love affair with an A-list actor. To me, this is a song about being obsessed with Jacob Elordi, while intimately knowing the pitfalls of actors as a Coppola. Art is all about interpretation!

Romy is a noted fan of the very tall, Australian actor who starred as Elvis in her mom’s film Priscilla.  In The Making of Priscilla, the nepo-baby squeals, “Oh my god, Jacob Elordi!!” before asking her mom to take a photo of her with him. Sofia Coppola says no. Romy complains, “I don’t care that she’s the director of this film. This film is about to be over,” and pouts. Sofia Coppola smooths things over by patting Romy on the head and taking a photo of both her daughters with Jacob in his big Elvis fur coat on her film camera — a photo that sadly does not appear in Sofia Coppola Archive. 

Romy consistently drops photos with Jacob or photos she took of Jacob in “camera roll dumps” on TikTok. My favorite shows Jacob presenting her with her birthday cake. She also posted a video of Jacob captioned, “Forcing jacob to make snapchats that were sent directly to my failed talking stage.” An unimaginable dynamic is shown off in these casual posts. 

There’s this tension between her access to Jacob and her teenage girl adoration of him — one photo on her TikTok shows a friend holding one of those Jacob Elordi’s bathwater candles — that manifests in the disillusionment of “A-Lister.” 

As for evidence this song is inspired by Jacob, it directly references Elvis’s big red car in verse one and it returns in the catchy chorus, “I met an actor last night, he called me a star / Said he hates the spotlight, I hate his big red car.” I love the way she dismisses his performance of being an a-list actor, “hating the spotlight,” while simultaneously wanting him and him as a status symbol. That friction is a throughline of the song. 

“They don’t stop acting when they’re off-screen / But I’m 50 percent sure he’s the real thing,” she sings. It’s the kind of cutting dig at actors that wouldn’t exist if the same song was written by a regular teenage girl obsessed with an actor. “A-Lister” is a rare moment where the nepo-baby perspective is leveraged to complicate a universal fantasy. But despite growing up in one of the most famous filmmaker families, she can’t help but dream of dating an a-list actor. That’s girlhood, baby! 

“DON’T FUCKING TALK TO ME ABOUT HOT ONES”: Mainstream media is catching up with a major concern of Altar Boys. Vulture went deep on what they call the “New Media Circuit” and what’s known to Altar Boys as the viral clip economy. The story frames Timothée Chalamet’s The Complete Unknown “press” cycle as the blueprint for the new version of a perfect run. He successfully “weaponized various corners of the internet” in an unlikely combination of interviews and guest spots. His strategy certainly won the hearts and minds of straight men. But I don’t think anyone else could have pulled that smorgasburg of viral moments off, he is a generational talent after all. 

Its most astute observation is, “charting a course across too many second-tier stops (random TikTok personalities, niche podcasts, etc.) runs the risk of making the talent seem a little small-time,” which as you know is how I felt when Cate Blanchett went on Subway Takes. I fear for the future of the deeply reported profile. 

FINALLY A MUSIC FILM THAT UNDERSTANDS TO BE A FAN IS TO BE A FREAK: Go see Alex Ross Perry’s strange ode to Pavement and then read Hua Hsu’s excellent analysis of it. In a landscape of dull music biopics, Pavements is the first contemporary music movie that actually feels like a superfan made it. Hsu wrote, “The magic of pop music isn’t just the star on the stage; it’s how the crowd sways, and what fans do afterward with the feelings inspired by the show. All this made ‘Pavements’ feel more exceptional. It seemed to exist adjacent to the band. A true fanatic’s take, it aspires to be as heady and as weird as the band itself.” True fandom inspires weird art! 

It’s playing at Film Forum (and The Roxie and The Rafael).

I’M SO EXCITED FOR TOO MUCH: I dove head first into Vanity Fair’s first look at Lena Dunham’s forthcoming Netflix TV show. It seemingly has everything, including Emily Ratajowski carrying a McNally Jackson tote. Loved this quote from Too Much star, Meg Stalter: “Lena makes me feel like a teenager, just laughing and gossiping and telling secrets. When you’re little, girls aren’t always told that you can be weird and wild—and I think we both have remained that way as adults.” Only 34 days until its release!

NEW LUCAS HEDGES NEWS: Dominic Sessa will play Anthony Bourdain in an A24 biopic. Not that we ever need a biopic, but we especially don’t need a biopic of someone who is already so prolific on film. 

INDULGENCES: MY ALTAR BOYS

Former Skins cast members, anyone Irish, British actors whose breakout role was “playing gay,” rappers from Kentucky, and men in Ocean’s Eleven (and their codependent best friends) are all fair game.

JACK HARLOW seemingly joined Letterboxd. I was the 17th follower of @missionaryjackk, which I discovered after Charli XCX liked one of his reviews. He has yet to verify the account, and honestly given his humorous and clever nature, I am starting to doubt that the Kentucky rapper is behind it. The only review that has yet to make me chuckle to myself the way his lyrics do was of The Shining, “Not for me.” If this IS Jack, he does share my feelings on Past Lives, “Woulda loved some more friction,” further evidence we’re soulmates! 

ROLE MODEL will star as Natalie Portman’s younger lover alongside her older lover Mark Ruffalo in Lena Dunham’s forthcoming rom com, Good Sex. Uh oh, this is my second Lena Dunham mention today… In a bro podcast, Role Model explained how he heard rumors that Lena Dunham was asking about him. Soon they hopped on a call and she offered him a part. The concept of Lena Dunham asking about you! I am dying to know how she found out about him. As I wrote in a rare TikTok comment, her eye for talent is unmatched!

HARRIS DICKINSON’s directorial debut, Urchin, was met with rave reviews at Cannes. I’m so, so proud of him! In other Harris news, he will voice Mr. Darcy in an Audible adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. I fear this is all we will be getting of the gentle Englishman for a while due to his sentence to Beatles biopic prison </3. 

HARRY STYLES looked so cute that I am bringing it 2 weeks later and I’m not saying that very often lately!

As always, I’m open to your feedback and suggestions of what to include in Altar Boys. I’m back on social media for My New Job, but if you see an Altar Boy, still pleasesay something!