It's An Honor Just to Be Nominated
Don't Blame Me, Ep. 103
Roll out the Red Carpet, it’s Awards Season in Tinsel Town—available for a limited time only, 12 consecutive months a year!
There’s never a shortage of hullabaloo and hubbub in Hollywoodland! Huzzah!
Who wore it best?, indeedy!
Why, at least one dozen awards programmes of merit and fluff honor the television arts and sciences with impressive statuettes on-loan to the recipients.
“But who are these mysterious arbiters of praiseworthiness?” you may be asking yourselves, and “Should a comma go after the question mark in this sentence?”
“What might their qualifications be?” you continue, returning to the original thought-train, but still annoyed by the comma or lack thereof. “And why do they consistently choose the same uninspired time-wastes year-after-year?”
The short answer: there is no need for a comma, although it does seem off—an unsettling disturbance to the visual poetry of the whole shebang.
To clarify:
The Emmys
The Academy of Television Arts and Sciences presents the Primetime Emmy Awards. To become a member of the Academy, initiates must work in the television arts and sciences and kiss the tail of Baphomet at the monthly potlucks.
Out of all the awards shows, The Emmys do the best job categorizing categories (sort of.) The Academy honors the full breadth and scope of the television arts and sciences, even for TV jobs no one knew existed—not even the nominees and winners.
All 16,000 members of the Academy nominate the best program categories, but only peers can nominate peers within their peer groups for peer categories—writing, directing, acting, editing, catering, pants, etc.
Final voting is conducted by a secret cabal of Academy “volunteers”—underemployed television professionals with time to devote to watching hundreds of hours of programming as though that somehow keeps them vital and relevant in an uncaring industry that’s passed them by.
Or something like that.
According to their own blah blah blah, the Academy “is dedicated to celebrating excellence, innovation and the advance of the telecommunications arts and sciences.”
Sometimes. Maybe. Probably more so on the technical side than creatively, for sure.
I mean, c’mon, since Ernie Kovacs, how many truly can be called innovators of the television arts? A dozen mavericks, at most?
The Golden Globes
Until last year, the Golden Globes were the domain of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, a league of entertainment journalists and photographers who plied their trade under the employ of foreign publications.
Nominees and winners were decided by 100 fast-talking, chain-smoking reporters drinking gimlets in sweltering banana republic cantinas, one chance encounter away from being implicated in a murder-for-hire scheme.
In 2024, Dick Clark Productions bought the Golden Globes, and now, teenagers in the studio audience rank TV shows on a scoring scale of 35 to 98. Most winners have “a good beat, and you can dance to it.”
The Critics Choice Awards
The Critics Choice Association is an organization of 500 or so North American entertainment journalists, print and broadcast critics for whom covering the television industry is their beat.
This venerated institution throws the annual Critics Choice Awards, an event so revered, it’s broadcast on E!.
SAG WGA DGA PGA
Several de facto trade unions1 use 19th-Century Workers Party rhetoric to negotiate and enforce collective bargaining agreements for showbiz types against exploitative and abusive studio fat cats, network bigwigs and armies of robot scabs.
Naturally, organized labor should celebrate the most consistently-workingest and highest-paid 1% of their memberships with lavish awards galas.
In Hollywood, unions refer to themselves as “guilds”—though only The Directors Guild offers any legitimate apprenticeship programs like ye olden-days guilds of yesteryear and yore.
Instead, card-carrying members of The Screen Actors Guild and Writers Guild work Red Faires to “hone their craft” by selling Henry VIII-sized turkey drumsticks and tankards of barleywine and mead.
The rank-and-file of entertainment industry “guilds” are chosen by lottery to serve on nominating committees for their respective awards shows.
One might think that random selection more than qualifies a person for the task, but judging by the fiddle faddle that gets nominated, this process might need review.
The Independent Spirit Awards
The Independent Spirit Awards is “the premiere awards event for the independent film and television community.”
For a measly 100 duckets of US cash, any schmo can join Film Independent’s organization of filmmakers, film industry executives and film connoisseurs to cast a vote for low-budget indies like “Shogun.”
The Peoples Choice Awards
Nominees for The Peoples Choice Awards are determined by an independent media research company that uses quantitative “metrics” and other impressive business lingo to vet the quality of shows, movies and record albums—cuz nothing screams creative ingenuity more than spreadsheets, graphs and pie charts.
Then, regular folks like you and me vote online to pick the winners, giving vox to the populi.
And we all know that the people always make the right choice when given a say, amiright?!2
Stay-tuned for Don’t Blame Me, Ep. 103
I settle the lingering comma debate once and for all.
The PGA is a trade association that “represents, protects and promotes the members of producing teams and professional golfers in film, television, and emerging media who work daily to drive interest, participation and inclusion in the sport.” The PGA hosts educational, mentoring and networking programs, celebrity golf tournaments and screenings of Tim Conway’s “Dorf on Golf.”
Like that last time Americans voted for something…remember? When we sold our democracy to oligarchs and hucksters for the want of cheaper gas prices? Remember? Good times.