Casey Berner: Not another award show

On Feb. 22, ABC will air the 81st Annual Academy Awards at 7 p.m. I will tune in around 9:30 p.m. just to catch the last few minutes when they announce the more important awards. The Best Adapted Screenplay from a Literary Work Dated Between the 17th and 19th Century Award does not interest me.

Ok, so that’s not a real award given out. Sue me. But I can’t sit in front of the TV and waste an entire three hours watching over-paid celebrities either try to form a coherent sentence because they are drunk on alcohol or try to make a political statement because they are drunk on their ego. You find out who won everything on Google the next day anyway.

Now, the Grammy Awards are Feb. 8, and I will NOT watch that. The music award show that honors top music performers has gone downhill in recent years in my opinion, just like the quality of popular music lately. What happened to the days of Grammy performances by U2 and Coldplay, or at least Paul McCartney (how many times can the guy play “Hey Jude”?)? Now it’s T.I. and Katy Perry doing a rendition of John Lennon’s “Imagine.”

Ok, so that is also not happening, but you see my point.

On top of the lackluster performances, the program makes you wait with their “American Idol” style commercial breaks, going to commercials right before the good stuff. Really, it’s just to sell more sodas: thanks, Coca-Cola.

The fact that award shows have become less interesting and less entertaining to watch is only part of the problem. Another part is that there are so many now. I will attempt to list as many as I can off the top of my head: MTV Movie Awards; MTV Video Music Awards; Golden Globe Awards; People’s Choice Awards; Screen Actors Guild Awards; Country Music Awards; American Music Awards; Billboard Music Awards; Critics Choice Awards; The Emmy Awards and The Kids Choice Awards.

While I catch my breath, think about all those award shows. Do we really need all of them?

Plus, they just seem to drag on forever. Award recipients have only a specific time window to thank a lot of people we don’t recognize, and then the music starts playing. It gets louder, and in response, the recipient gets louder. This direct relationship continues until a nice-looking woman in a cheap cocktail dress forces the recipient off stage.

This was the modus operandi for years until all those winners started to get smart. They refused to leave and just continued on, saying something like, “Don’t do this to me,” or, “This is my fourth Grammy tonight, and I still have new people to thank.” So, the awards people got smart, too, and put in a remote microphone that disappeared into the floor. Then they broke to commercial as fast as they could.

If they really wanted to make the show shorter, they would just take out all the excess junk. Do we really need to know how the Oscar Award statue was made? What about how all the awards were tabulated or how the envelopes were sealed? NO! That would save at least a half an hour.

Understand that if we had one, or even two, award shows that honored the best of their craft, I would watch it. If there was one catch-all awards show, we wouldn’t have this problem.

I know the Academy Awards is the biggest honor a film can receive, but what makes a Screen Actor’s Guild award better than a Golden Globe, or a Critics Choice versus People’s Choice?

Don’t get me wrong. Anyone who works in the entertainment industry and creates some of these works of art, either in film, television, or music, deserves all the awards and praise they get. But why do we need to feel obligated to watch every award show TV networks decide to air?

So on Feb. 22 at 10:02 p.m., when the news has been delayed because Brad Pitt is making another comment on Africa and we haven’t even gotten to Best Actor, I’ll think to myself, “Maybe I should just Google it later.”