The Teen Choice Awards

So. Apparently the Teen Choice awards were handed out last night. Or so I’ve heard. As you’ve probably guessed, I wasn’t exactly glued to my TV watching them.

But, as far as I can determine, these would seem to be roughly the equivalent of the poor man’s People’s Choice awards. Now, don’t get me wrong: I have great respect for the People’s Choice awards. They tend to represent the views of the general public at large, rather than the views of a bunch of snobbish movie critics and other Hollyweird types. Typically, the movies nominated for Best Movie on the People’s
Choice list tend to out-earn their counterparts on the Academy Awards list by an average of five to one. And, while you occasionally see an occasional blockbuster from an Oscar winner, this tends to be the exception, rather than the rule. The most obvious reason for this is that the People’s Choice awards are based on polls of the American Public at large, while the Oscars are based on votes from a select group of Hollywood elites, who generally tend to believe their tastes are far, far above those of “ordinary Americans”

But when I hear about the Teen Choice awards, I am given cause to stop and ponder. Like the PC’s, the TC’s are awarded based on the results of an on-line poll. And, while I have never voted in this poll, I have to believe that not a whole lot of care is taken to ensure that only the votes of people between the ages of 13 and 19 are counted in this poll. After all, we’re talking about an internet poll. And if there is one thing that is universally true about the internet everywhere, it’s
that it allows for total anonymity. I’m sure that if I had taken leave of my senses and decided to cast a vote in this poll, there would have been nothing to stop me from doing so. Hell, I’m almost tempted to cast a vote in the next poll just for laughs. Almost.

So the TC’s are really nothing more than just a lighter version of the PC’s. Another excuse for Hollyweird to throw another ridiculous party and show themselves off in fashions most ordinary Americans wouldn’t be caught dead wearing.

The awards themselves, of course, are nothing more than negotiating tools the stars who won them can use to wring a few more millions out of the Hollyweird brass when they are negotiating the salaries for their next movie, or their next TV role, or their next album. Oh, and the awards are a joke: They are shaped like surfboards. REAL surfboards. 6-foot tall SURFBOARDS!

This years big winner in the movies category was, naturally, the latest Twilight movie. After all, how could millions of hormone-crazed teens (and probably more than a few internet predators pretending to be hormone-crazed teens) NOT vote for a movie starring, apparently, 3 of the most beautiful young people in Hollywood.

An aside: I managed to last through about 20 minutes of the first Twilight movie a few months ago. Then, I turned it off. And spent the next ten minutes looking for an ice pick or other suitably long, thin, sharp object that I could jam into my head in order to permanently lobotomize the part of my brain that carried the memory of that anal excretion of a movie. Fortunately, I soon gave up on my search and simply drank a heroic amount of alcohol. It helped, for no other reason than it killed enough brain cells to dim the memory. The movie sucked, is what I’m saying, in case you didn’t get it.

So the TC’s have now come and gone. Hollywood has patted itself on the back again. And I have to believe that no one outside of Hollywood gives a rat’s ass. I sure don’t.