Posts Tagged ‘awards’

After all is said, done, and awarded, he performs a kickass closing number to bring it all home.

Watch the People's Choice Awards last night? This year they added a great interactive feature where you could go to the cool flashy voting thing on their Web site and cast your vote in four categories, with votes being tallied all the way up through the first half of the live awards show itself. Sweet!

Of course, two of those categories were never, at any point, expressly mentioned during the telecast. Those would be Favorite Online Sensation and Favorite User-Generated Video, the online-only awards, which apparently were popular enough to drum up some Internet buzz and traffic for the PCA site but not enough to, you know, explicitly acknowledge on camera in any audible way.

This follows the pattern set by last year's Emmy Awards, which included an online-only poll for people to vote for TV's Most Memorable Moments, winners to be shown during the Emmy broadcast, only none of them ever were, probably because they barely had enough time to cram in all the long, cringe-inducing bouts of reality-show-host banter as it was. Why show a moment from the history of television which touched the hearts of millions when you could just let Howie Mandel rant aimlessly for another 10 minutes?

(Of course, it could be a conspiracy. Joss Whedon's show "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" won the "TV's Most Memorable Moments, Drama" Emmy last spring and his "Dr. Horrible" won Favorite Online Sensation last night; maybe there's some sort of legendary Hollywood prophecy, whispered amongst the ancient executives, that California will sink beneath the waves if someone is ever foolhardy enough to hand him an award?)

So we're good enough to fan the flames of buzz, give marketers something to do and make the awards shows seem marginally more relevant, but we don't get to sit at the big kids' table at the ceremony. Fair enough, fair enough. Especially since I don't watch the awards shows on TV anyway.

They're a lot better online.

In user-edited 2-minute ad-free only-the-best-line-of-the-night all-the-boring-banter-chopped-out clips on YouTube.

After all, those are the people's choice…

Over at EW.com (and presumably in this weeks' Entertainment Weekly; despite their constant entreaties and veiled threats I let my subscription lapse), they provide their suggestions towards fixing the Emmys. I had mixed reactions.

First off, I agree the Emmys need fixing. Years from now, on my deathbed, my biggest regret will be the loss of those irreplaceable three hours of reality-show-fueled horror, especialy when I knew I could just wait an hour and watch the best 10-15 minutes of it on YouTube. But how to honor our best and brightest without boring the crap out of everybody?

I'm right behind their suggestion of getting Neil Patrick Harris to host. He has the perfect mix of self-assurance, witty ad-libs, honest respect for the craft, and sheer delight in being there that makes for a great host. But I flatly disagree that cable shows and movies should be pushed to the technical Emmys night; some of them are the best shows on TV, why banish them?

Instead, I suggest you get rid of the most annoying, time-wasting part of the show: the presenter bits. Tired and hackneyed, more of a joke themselves than actually amusing, the only presenter jokes that actually work are those which make fun of how bad presenter jokes are (a la Rickles, Stewart, Colbert, et al). Mostly they're just painful reminders that most presenters aren't that good in a live situation. Dump 'em.  Read the rest of this entry »

There's good news for those of us who haven't watched anything in the last two years that wasn't streaming. The Emmys have marched proudly into 2002 by adding a new category, to be awarded later this month, in the field of "original entertainment programming created specifically for nontraditional viewing platforms," which means TV shows that appear pretty much anywhere besides your actual TV.

Which makes sense, really. Why shouldn't the fine creative work being produced for mobile phones, handheld devices, and the Internet get the same opportunity to be skipped, shunned, and shamefully robbed as the rest of the entertainment world?

Read the rest of this entry »

Good news: #1 in box office this weekend, and well-deserved. Fantastic movie no matter what age you are.

Bad news: A fire destroyed their studio and most of their props and sets over the weekend. Wow. I can't even imagine what that must do to see your life's work destroyed, although Wallace and Gromit's creator, Nick Park, said the earthquake in South Asia helped put the loss into perspective.

"Even though it is a precious and nostalgic collection and valuable to the company, in light of other tragedies, today isn't a big deal," he said.