The People’s Choice Awards this year had no live ceremony, no live audience and almost no live viewers. It was a collection of pre-taped clips and the usual, “It’s an honor just to be nominated” nonsense. Or so I hear. Like most of you, I didn’t watch it.
The Golden Globe Awards show, a completely unnecessary event in the best of times, usually runs three hours long loaded with plenty of celebrity face time. This year it got reduced to an hour of film clips and talking heads. Again, that’s just what I hear. Like most of you, I didn’t watch it, either. There was no red carpet, no embarrassing acceptance speeches, no fake looks of surprise on the winners’ faces.
“Who! Me! A winner! You’ve got to kidding! I deserted my wife and kids and became an actor to fill this big empty hole inside me – not to win awards! This is such a complete shock!”
These ceremonies weren’t trimmed because the celebrities couldn’t ad lib such lines as “Nice dress, Angelina,” and “It’s a pleasure to be here tonight,” without union writers, but because most actors are in the Screen Actors Guild and would not cross the Writers Guild picket line.
Union people stick together and help each other. It’s the only way millionaire actors can stand up against billionaire producers. Some actors have even let the writers make a little extra money during the strike by hiring them to clean their pools, weed their gardens and baby-sit their kids. It’s worked out particularly well since illegal immigrants are getting harder to find while it’s easy to find unemployed scriptwriters on every corner. Solidarity forever!
Fortunately for the writers, everyone in Los Angeles is in a union. The musicians, the limo drivers, the red carpet installers, the cameramen, the cops, the firemen, the food handlers, and the cleaning crew, the reporters, the teachers, the migrant workers, the telephone linemen, the electricians. Pool boys and producer’s assistants are about the only unaffiliated people in the whole town. So, feel free to exploit them.
The way things are going, it looks as if many of the other awards shows will suffer the same fate as the Golden Globe Awards. The Grammys, the Oscars, the Tonys ... whoops! Never mind, who would notice if they skipped the Tonys? But you get my drift.
