Ignoring the Emmys.

Last night I watched 60 Minutes and The Simpsons, as usual, and was interrupted regularly by footballaters who wanted to know the scores, and why on earth a red-blooded American male would not be watching one of the several games played that Sunday. You want to know the freakin’ score? Get on the internet. The TV takes too long.

While the men were focused on football, the women were focused on the Emmys. This is not because anyone actually watches the shows that were nominated; who has time? Mainly it’s for the fashions, to make fun of who wore what. I didn’t watch any of it. After The Simpsons I watched a few minutes of The Mummy Returns, then decided I had more than enough TV for one evening. Even though Shaft was on later. (Shaft’s a bad mothershutyourmouth.)

I have no patience for award shows. All of them take too long, and all we really want to know is who won. If we even want to know that. I don’t care who won so much as I care about whether the shows I like are going to stay on the air, and winning awards doesn’t necessarily help or hurt a show’s ratings. And the award shows usually pre-empt the halfway decent shows that are usually on in that time slot; but fortunately this year the Emmys show was on CBS, and only pre-empted another godawful made-for-TV movie, featuring Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen playing married actors who so desperately want to work together that they’ll make godawful made-for-TV movies.

I have no patience for the fashions either. Much too much is made of the fortysomething actresses who are—let’s be honest—actresses, and are too busy acting to know jack squat about fashion. Yet the people who clothe them convince them to push their boobs together, squeeze into unflattering, untelegenic outfits that don’t match their skin tones, yet the designers are convinced that they’re “daring” enough to get the actresses (and thus the designers) noticed; get their hair coifed into something that no sane human being would want to wear since the fall of the French Monarchy; and look like this throughout a widely televised and photographed ceremony. And, as a result, Joan Rivers continues to have a career bad-mouthing the stupid, when she should have been lobotomized during her last facelift.

And then there are the useless shows, which are popularity contests where you vote for your favorite. There are several of them—some even produced by Dick Clark—and while the MTV awards are still the most amusing, they’re still extremely useless. But the celebrities gotta show up for them or they’ll look like self-centered bastards; and to put these pseudo-awards on your resumé makes you look even more pathetic (“Winner, Teen Choice award for ‘Most Bootylicious,’ 2003, 2004”); and even though the shows’ ratings sometimes suck they get enough viewers to break even.

As you can tell, I really don’t like award shows.

But I did enjoy my own awards. Back at Sac State the staff members would have an end-of-the-semester award presentation, where the editors would award their staff for best article, best editorial work, etc. I had a staff of seven, but I didn’t see any of them as standouts, so I replaced the usual stupid awards with the “Dementia Awards.” These were not traditional categories; these were awards for “Biggest whiner,” “Scariest look when unshowered,” “Most reckless driver,” “Biggest pothead,” and so forth. These were all inside jokes, so they were more appreciated than the knock-off versions created by other editors in the following semesters.

I actually had one guy complain when he didn’t win the “Biggest pothead” award, though. True, he was a pretty big stoner, but the winner traded his entire summer job earnings for three Hefty leaf bags full of weed. He’s now a college professor, of all things.

Those awards were fun. The others are just obnoxious.