Daily Inspiration Quote by Steven Cojocaru

It lands like a throwaway joke, but it’s really a shrewd little manifesto about who gets to belong in the glittery, gated world of awards culture. Steven Cojocaru, a red-carpet critic who’s made a career translating couture into conversation, frames the Academy Awards not as a remote holy site but as a group outing: “come with us.” That pronoun matters. He’s building a temporary “we” big enough to fit the audience at home, then undercutting the whole exclusivity myth with the most unglamorous vehicle imaginable: a bus.

The humor is doing double duty. On the surface, “I’m going to pay for the bus” reads as a playful flex, a campy promise of generosity. Underneath, it punctures the pageantry. Nobody carpools to the Oscars; you get driven. A bus is what you take when you’re not important, when you’re going somewhere as a crowd, not as anointed individuals. By offering the bus fare, Cojocaru positions himself as a cultural middleman who can escort outsiders to the velvet rope, even if it’s only in imagination.

Contextually, it’s pure red-carpet-era populism: the moment when awards shows became mass-participation TV events, and critics became hosts, tour guides, and stand-up comics. The line acknowledges the hunger to be “in the room” while admitting, with a wink, that the whole machine runs on that distance. The bus closes the gap and quietly reminds you it was manufactured in the first place.