IT SHOULD HAPPEN TO YOU.

Stevie Ryan received her first Oscar, after a fashion, this year, at the age of twenty-two, only eighteen months after moving to Los Angeles to become a movie star. She grew up in California's high desert, a couple of hours to the east, in a town along the road to Las Vegas called Victorville. Her parents worked at calibrating truck scales for weigh stations on the interstate--a family business going back two generations on her mom's side. Throughout her childhood and adolescence, Ryan harbored escape fantasies involving the Hollywood of her parents' and grandparents' generations--Lucille Ball, Audrey Hepburn, Buster Keaton, Clara Bow--but she never participated in high-school theatrical productions. She did attend her high-school prom dressed as Marilyn Monroe, down to the elbow-length gloves. (Her date wore a Mohawk and muttonchops.) After a brief stint in community college, she concluded that she was "too right-brain for school," and followed an older brother to Huntington Beach--anything to get out of Victorville. "Then I thought, Screw these people--I'll just go to L.A., see what happens," she said recently.

The Oscar was delivered rather unceremoniously--not in March, at the Academy Awards, but in August, three and a half minutes into a sketch Ryan was filming, while she was still in character as Cynthia, an eighteen-year-old Latina from East L.A. who is better known as Little Loca, after the handle Ryan uses when she uploads some of her homemade sketches onto the video-sharing site YouTube. This was about the fortieth in a series of short Little Loca videos that had by then attracted over a million viewings, thanks to Loca's "big old mouth" (both literally--her heavily outlined lips command attention--and figuratively) and her irreverent putdowns ("You better watch out, fool, because God's gonna come around and strike you down with some lightning if you don't be careful"). Loca was wearing a bandanna and hoop earrings, and sitting on a sofa, against a plain white wall, between two women who were known to regular viewers as Smiley (a friend of Ryan's) and Silent Girl (Ryan's cousin). Rap music was playing in the background.

"Damn, this shit is heavy," Loca said, in a pronounced Hispanic accent, after accepting the gold statuette from Smiley and waving it around. "I could knock somebody out with this." Then she launched into an earnest acceptance speech. "I want to thank YouTube," she said. "You're so important in my life right now. And without YouTube there's no way in hell Loca could have, you know, got something like this."

It seemed to be a genuine Oscar--stolen from a bar by a friend of Ryan's--and the moment was rich with postmodern significance. Over the previous three months, Loca's fans, many of them Hispanic, had warmed to her story: spunky ghetto kid--a chola--with an overprotective older brother, a 4.0 grade-point average, and her innocence proudly intact. (That gang sign that she seemed to flash at the end of each video was really a sideways V, for virgin.) They knew she'd been prom queen, and they had met her onetime boyfriend Raul. They'd learned that Silent Girl went mute after the death of her brother, an innocent bystander in a botched robbery. And they'd grown accustomed to Loca's distinctive, almost bewitching screen presence--the way her dark eyebrows and pursed lips slide effortlessly from a knowing smile to an outraged glare. At the same time, they'd begun noticing suspicious details that called into question the diary's authenticity: the mole on Loca's right cheek seemed to vary in size and placement; Raul bore a striking resemblance to Drake Bell, the co-star of Nickelodeon's "Drake and Josh," a teen sitcom; and didn't Loca resemble a young woman--a white woman--named Stevie Ryan, who'd been photographed with Drake Bell at the MTV Movie Awards, in June? Accepting the Oscar as Loca was Stevie Ryan's tacit way of acknowledging the act while also congratulating herself on having legitimately achieved a kind of alternate-reality stardom. Smiley and Silent Girl wore black Little Loca T-shirts they'd bought on the Web from a total stranger.

Loca's outing mirrored, in some ways, that of the season's most famous Internet adolescent, LonelyGirl15, whose homespun, if sharply edited, tales of science projects, boy troubles, and religion captivated millions of YouTube viewers before she was exposed as the creation of filmmakers represented by the Creative Artists Agency on Wilshire Boulevard, instead of, say, a girl in her bedroom on some sleepy Midwestern Main Street. But whereas the people behind LonelyGirl15 were interested, from the outset, in exploring the ...