NEW YORK — Simon Rex, in town for the recent Gotham Awards, where he was nominated for outstanding lead performance in “Red Rocket,” was comparing today’s pandemic-scarred New York with the city he knew in the 1990s as a VJ on MTV. “Times Square was like pimps and sex booths and then it became Disneyland. Now it feels kind of sketchy again and I kind of like it,” Rex says, smiling. “Maybe I shouldn’t say that.” However much New York has changed in the last 25 years, it’s got nothing on the fluctuations of fortune for Rex. The 47-year-old sometimes actor, sometimes rapper, regular social-media prankster and Los Angeles nightlife…