Is there a celebrity culture in academia and should we discourage it?
Academia is an extremely primitive and immature system in many ways, driven disproportionately by emotion and status over merit or egalitarianism. You will be reminded of a lot of academic social behavior if you read about the social behavior of the other primates. 

However it is a unfair to suggest that people are simply acting as smitten teenagers swooning over big-shots because they have their own academic reality show. It is a social system which is behaving rationally in rewarding those who move it forward (or some new direction which at the time seems to be forward). Papers are almost a sideshow (written by underpaid postdocs), and citation count is merely a proxy metric for this. But impact, that which citation count tries to measure, is a very real and valuable thing; how well you can attract lots of funding to a research direction, as well as attract lots of other researchers into that direction, determines how important your career is to the system. And, in the absence of other sources of information, makes for a decent predictor for how important your work is currently and will be in the future.