The NYT Weddings & Celebrations are a place for the hoi polloi to GTFO, not for artsy-fartsies "making" things other than Exeter-bound offspring and family mergers. Phyllis Nefler investigates the recent rash of ridiculousness: let those fuckers eat wedding cake!

Has anyone else noticed a distinct lack of hotshot/BSD/masters of the universe weddings these days? I sometimes wonder if this is an editorial decision—suspiciously tanned "hedge fund managers" are themselves toxic assets these days; sorry, CFO of Surf's Up Capital!—or whether the shortage originates from the supply side. I mean, I could see these ladies wanting to, ahem, postpone the wedding.

No matter. Their loss is our realized gain: the Times pages now bustle with a newfound appreciation for the arts, making the section a gold mine of cultural recommendations. Call it the revenge of the creative overclass: this is what happens when Vows people make things.

Like sweet music! Did you know that Simon Cowell "put together" a "pop-opera quartet" named Il Divo? And that this pop-opera quartet is like the Backstreet Boys meets the 3 Tenors plus another guy multiplied by some Mariah Carey and translated into Italian? You do now!

The groom, David Miller, joined this group after homewrecking the bride Sarah Kabanuck's previous marriage — this featured Vows column, like so many Modern Love pieces, leaves you wincing for the feelings of the former spouses whose lives seem to be so breezily failing — and after performing in an Italian version of Rigoletto in which "the audiences booed him and within days he was fired."

Simon Cowell has a rigorous screening process.

Then we have independent film producers like Julianna Dangel (stepdaughter of Tweed Roosevelt, "a great-grandson of Theodore Roosevelt"), who has manifested from imagination into reality something called No Pink, seemingly based off this short story that reads like a Jodi Picault / Alice Sebold mashup as well as this avant garde concept film, College:

The One Crazy Night script never goes out of style. Nor does the Very Special Episode: some of our creative newlyweds have chosen to focus their attention on the serious issues. Alexandra Moss, a Harvard graduate, has turned out an HBO Documentary Films segment about Alzheimer's:

Click to view

Meanwhile, her new husband Jonathan Bardin, a fellow Harvard grad, has been studying the neurobiology of stroke and traumatic brain injury. Both of them are barely over 25 years old, by the way.

If Alexandra and Jonathan were characters in Kurt Vonnegut's dystopian (is the dystopian redundant, the way it is with Margaret Atwood?) short story Harrison Bergeron, they would be required to wear a series of draconian "handicaps" to compensate for their superior intellect and bring them down to average.

And then their tragic lives would be set to a haunting score by Lee Brooks, a music producer who composed the music behind the short film 2081, which is based on Harrison Bergeron and was shown at the Seattle International Film Festival in May. You know what: file this one under Things We Actually Like.

Hey, Evan Eneman produced a score TOO! His is for the upcoming film "Precious", which all I have to say is: OPRAH WINFREY AND TYLER PERRY.

Eneman's special lady friend, Heather Silverman, was a video game trailer editor (!) who "was also the director and editor of "Warning", a music video for the hip-hop group Trillogy." I like these two, and also Heather's dad is an awesome New York Times sports photographer. Of course he is.

Of course, none of this would be complete without throwing a New Yorker cartoonist into the mix, you know? Playing that role is Mort Gerberg, dad of bride Lilia and creator of this:

It's for HuffPo, but it might as well be for the New Yorker because it has the upscale skiing humor and also I have no idea what it means.

Anyway, other people who weren't hippie artists got married too! Whose wedding is the more perfect work of art?

Carolyn Snyder and Christopher Warshaw

The couple met at Stanford, "where they are candidates for doctorates, she in global climate change, he in political science.": +5
The groom, who graduated from Williams magna cum laude, is also pursuing a law degree: +4
The bride has a master's from Oxford, where she was a Marshall Scholar: +4
The groom is on the board of the Sierra Club: +2
The bride's father was a Washington litigator: +1
The groom's mother has published nine nonfiction books, including "The Co-Presidency of Bush and Cheney": +1
The bride is keeping her name: -1

TOTAL: 16

Cassandra Wolos and Vikram Pattanayak

The bride graduated magna cum laude from Harvard and the groom summa cum laude from University of Pennsylvania: +11
The groom has a masters degree in chemistry and is persuing a medical degree and a doctoral degree in chemistry at Harvard: +6
The bride is a doctoral student in statistics at Harvard: +2
The couple met in 1998 as teenagers: +1
The couple's combined age is 50: +2

TOTAL: 22. Ivy League will always beat out NESCAC, and Stanford may be the Harvard of the West but Harvard is the Harvard of the Universe, my friends.

Enjoy your day off tomorrow and use it to create content, man, whether it be a musical score or a quirky indie film. Be brave! If all else fails, you can always turn to Simon Cowell.