Award Shows Suck

Now that 30 Rock has won the Emmy for best comedy for the 35th year in a row, is the show going to be funny this season? I know Hollywood and the entertainment media are so far up Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin’s asses they do regular dental cleanings while they’re there and I like Tina Fey, but I’ve tried watching 30 Rock and it’s just not that funny. In fact I don’t know anyone whose opinion isn’t “meh” concerning this show. Are we giving the award to 30 Rock merely because Fey did a killer impression of Sarah Palin?

How many more years will it be before the voters actually watch the nominees before casting their vote? How many years in a row did Tony Shaloub win for Monk, 17 . . . 18? And Kelsey Grammar started winning for Frasier in the early 50s, 40 years before the show went on the air. Again, I like Shaloub, Grammar and their shows but the Emmy voters are like a bulldog with a bone, once they get their teeth into a show or an actor they won’t let go. The Shield was one of the best dramas ever made for television and it never won the Emmy for such. Watch the last 2 seasons and tell me Walton Goggins as Detective Shane Vendrell wasn’t the best actor on TV and he didn’t even get a nomination. Hell, Michael Chiklis deserved an Emmy just for the scene where he confessed all of Vic Mackey’s sins to the ICE agent and I don’t believe he was nominated either.

Of course, all awards shows are like this. I don’t think the voters actually watch or listen to any of the nominees, preferring instead to divine their picks by reading chicken entrails. Do you remember 1988, the first year they gave out a Grammy for Heavy Metal and they awarded it to Jethro Tull, a band as far from metal as Elton John is from subtlety? Note to voters, metal bands do not have fey British guys playing the flute on one leg.

How about the Oscars from 2006: The Departed for best picture? Martin Scorsese’s 115th mob movie with Jack Nicholson playing himself, that’s the best we could do? Or 1998 with Saving Private Ryan, one of the most amazing movies ever made, but Shakespeare in Love gets the Oscar. Spielberg films the invasion of Normandy so vividly veterans who were on the beaches for real are brought to tears, but we’re going to give the award to Gwyneth Paltrow in a beard. Now I love Dame Judi Dench, especially in the British TV series As Time Goes By, but she gets an Oscar for 8 minutes of screen time? I fully expected her acceptance speech to be “Are you shitting me?”

All this brings me to one conclusion: award shows suck.

Glenn Beck: The Czar of Conspiracy

Do you remember the movie Conspiracy Theory where Mel Gibson played a mentally unstable man whose life was consumed by paranoid delusions? For Glenn Beck this mediocre film was a watershed moment. It apparently gave his life direction and induced a psychotic break in Glenn’s feeble mind.

Glenn met more dullards like himself and convinced them to give him first a radio show and then a TV show on Headline News. Finally, he got called up to the show: the decepticons of Fox news gave him an hour a night and lots of publicity. Glenn’s mental breakdown has now reached Michele Bachmann-like proportions.

Last week on his show he was deciphering some artwork at 30 Rockefeller Center that he believes contains communist imagery. Now it’s hard to say what Glenn’s point was because after he rambled, spit and stalked his set like a bloated Yeti, he said, “What does this all mean? I don’t know.” So, since Glenn himself isn’t helping us I will speculate that he’s saying he believes John Rockefeller, who commissioned the artwork, was a commie pinko rat who wanted to bring about the downfall of America by subversively hiding communist symbols in plain sight.

One problem with this evil scheme that Glenn fails to recognize as his brain unravels like yarn from a spool: no one looks at this artwork. Case in point, Glenn asks one of his behind-the-scenes people if they had ever seen these images. The man answers he’s worked at 30 Rock for 29 years and had never seen it.

Call me cynical, but it’s hard to warp people’s minds with meaningful symbols if they never look at them. John Rockefeller was smart and savvy enough to amass one of the world’s largest fortunes, but couldn’t come up with a better plan to seduce people to the dark side than cryptic symbology that not even Dan Brown ever noticed?

Clearly, Glenn has gone bye bye. Farewell, Glenn’s sanity, we hardly knew ye.