My Kind Of Awards Show

Yay! Finally, an awards show I can almost tolerate. Thanks to the Writer’s Guild strike, the Golden Globes were axed and instead replaced by 30 minutes of people reading a list of winners--surely a “record for award-show brevity,” says the San Jose Mercury News.

Would that they could all be that way. No lame dance routines, cheesy film montages or dorky acceptance speeches from actors thanking their agents. All they needed was a fashion show starring Keira Knightly and George Clooney and it would have been perfect.

No, I didn’t watch it. I was at the hockey game, of course.

I hate awards shows. I think they’re patently stupid. I’ve sat through more than my fair share of CMA’s, ACM’s and Grammys as an audience member, and let me tell you: without the benefit of a bowl of popcorn and the remote control, the evening is excrutiating.

The Grammys are the worst. Hours of self-congratulatory snores as the industry awards the Best Salsa Performance By A Redhead On A Tuesday. Come on, Recording Academy, do you really need to award every musical genre imaginable--and broadcast a smattering of them to boot? No one cares about that classical stuff and most people don’t know the difference between Banda, Norteno, Mexican American and Tejano musical styles. Plus, don’t you have a Latin Grammy show to address that stuff, anyway?

The only awards show worth watching is the Oscars and the only reason to watch that is to see beautiful people wearing beautiful clothes.

The real reason I hate awards shows is that they're simply glorified advertisements, and as everyone knows, I hate being marketed to in such a dishonest way.

Awards shows have become very popular with the entertainment industry as a way to promote their product to a national audience. So they've basically become elaborate sales pitches for CDs and movies, and big advertising generators for the networks that carry them -- the actual “awards” are beside the point, selling advertising and giving artists exposure is the goal. That’s pretty much the point of the MTV Movie Awards, the CMT Awards (remember the “Flame Worthy” Awards? Agh.), the Billboard Music Awards, the Teen Choice Awards, the American Music Awards, MTV Video Awards, the People’s Choice Awards, the Kids Choice Awards, etc. etc. I can’t imagine enough people watch this crap to make staging these shows worthwhile, but apparently they do.

Anyway, Sharon Cobb has the list of Golden Globe winners, for those of you interested. If you read it with a copy of InStyle magazine in hand, it will almost be like a real awards show.