2006 Emmy's Wrap-up

The 58th Annual Emmy Awards were handed out Sunday night. In his opening monologue Conan O'Brien jokingly informed the audience that it was 58th and Final Emmy Awards. Unfortunately, I almost wish this were true. Yes, the Emmys were that bad. Not only were 80% of the awards they handed out ridiculous, many deserving actors and shows weren't even nominated. I'm convinced the people that vote do not watch tv. And to add insult to injury, the telecast itself was just plain boring.

This is not to say that the show did not start out well. It did indeed with a hilarious montage where Conan tries desperately to get to the Emmys as he travels through tvland. He gets: stranded on the Lost island, scared by Dwight and interviewed at The Office, trapped in a closet with Tom Cruise on South Park, 24's Chole on the phone for help, and diagnosed by House. Loved every second, except perhaps for the Dateline NBC bit. They could have cut that. Does anyone under 65 actually watch that show?

Conan's opening monologue was also great and I even enjoyed his song and dance number. I can definitely tell you if I were still in college or in some other situation where I regularly stayed up late on weeknites, his would be the late night tv show I'd watch. Forget Leno, Letterman and the rest. He then raised the bar by wheeling out Bob Newhart in an airtight chamber and informing him and the audience that if the show goes over 3 hrs that he would run out of air. Newhart's patented subtlety and deadpan expression were put to excellent use in this running gag. And funnily enough, most of the speeches were quite short. Very few were played off by the orchestra. You can breathe a sigh of relief: the show came in at 3 minutes under 3 hours. So Newhart lives!

Unfortunately the monologue had to end at sometime though and the awards presentation began. Here's a complete list of winners.

And now for some things that stood out to me in the big categories:

Best Supporting Actress - Megan Mullally won for Will & Grace. Thank God that show is done, so it can't get an y more awards. Who was robbed? Jaime Pressley, My Name is Earl

Best Supporting Actor - Alan Alda, The West Wing. Whoopee! They got one right. He wasn't there to accept it though.

Best Supporting Actress - Drama: Blythe Danner, Huff. I don't watch the show, so I can't judge. In general she's a good actress. Her speech was a bit scattered and daffy.

Best Supporting Actor - Comedy: Jeremy Piven, Entourage. Yes! I haven't watched this summer due to no HBO, but I loved him in the first two seasons and I love him in movies as well. Creede actually has a Jeremy Piven rule: If he's in the movie, it's bound to be good. So far, the rule has held true.

Best Variety Show - Daily Show. Who was robbed? The Colbert Report. The Emmys continues its reputation for always being behind the times. The Colbert Report is to the The Daily Show as The Simpsons is to Tracy Ullman.

Best Actor - Miniseries: Andre Brauer, Thief. Yes! If you missed this show, you should be kicking yourself.

Best Actor - Comedy: Tony Shaloub, Monk. Tony must have A LOT of friends in the biz. Who was robbed? Steve Carell.

Best Reality Show: Amazing Race. Who was robbed? Project Runway.

Best Actress - Drama: Mariska Hargitay, Law & Order, SVU. Like all police procedurals, this show requires very little acting, but all of the nominees sucked so it didn't really matter who won.

Best Actress - Comedy: Julia Louis Dreyfus, The New Adventures of Old Christine. I've never seen it, but I loved her as Elaine, so I'm okay with this.

Best Actor, Drama: Kiefer Sutherland, 24. I love his voice and I've liked this show on and off, but there are just so many better actors this could have gone to. Most of whom, of course, weren't even nominated.

Best Comedy: The Office!!! It's all good and Pam looked so glamorous. I loved show creator, Greg Daniel's speech. Who knew he and Conan used to be roomies.

Best Drama: 24. Who was robbed? Of the nominees, Grey's Anatomy or House.

Now for The Sundays:

Most Beautiful: Virginia Madsen looked absolutely gorgeous. It's also nice that she's not 20 years old and anorexic.

Best Dressed: Katherine Heigl's vintage Escada gown. Fabulous and it fit her perfectly.
Runners Up: Evangeline Lily (Kate from Lost), Helen Mirren and Annette Bening

Best Dressed and Pregnant: Heidi Klum. She looked amazing in her red gown. And she outshined many, many women of the night that actually had a waist.

Worst Dressed: Eva Longoria - her poofy white gown overwhelmed her. The proportion was off and teh bodice was weird.

Runners Up: Mariska Hargitay. I hated this dress. She looked big as a house, the detail in the front drew the eye to all the wrong places and the bodice was again, weird.

Best Hair: I really liked Kim Raver's upswept hair. It was very pretty and given that it was 100 degrees, practical.

Worst Hair: Paula Abdul, looking particularly troll-like.

Runner Up: Ellen Pompeo. Pulled back tight and straight, she looked even more like an alien fish than usual.

Best Idea for a Fashion Correspondent: Tim Gunn. It was a brilliant move to bring in Project Runway's top gun for the pre-show, but they didn't give him enough time.

Best Slapdown: Jeremy Piven to Billy Bush during the pre-show: " You have potential as a human being. You shouldn't be doing this."

Best Conan line: About the heaviness of the Emmy award: "Of course it's heavy! It's carrying the shattered dreams of four losers."

Funniest Speech: Greg Garcia, won for Best Writing for a Comedy Series (My Name is Earl): He read off who he didn't want to thank. These included his 8th grade science teacher and his first boss.

Runner Up: Marc Buckland, won for Best Directing of a Comedy Series (My Name is Earl). I guess we now know why this show can be so funny.

Funniest Presenter: Stephen Colbert calling the audience "godless sodomites".
Runner Up: Matthew Perry

Best Surprise: When all three of the original Charlies Angels walked out onstage together!! I was so excited when the music for the show started playing. Farrah was weird as always but Kate and Jaclyn were great and Jaclyn especially still looks beautiful.

Weirdest Pairing of presenters: Tyra Banks and Victor Garbor. You so know that Tyra had to be a last minute replacement for some no-show.

Freakiest Looking Guy: Ray Liotta. 4 words: Too much plastic surgery.

Biggest Problem with the Telecast: Too much crap we don't care about - tributes and the oodles of awards doled out to tv movies and miniseries. They need to get their own awards show.

Whew. That's it! Thank God for the Golden Globes. Maybe they'll be better.

Boulder Bumpersticker of the Day: They hate us for our freedom fries.

Denver T-shirt of the Day: If you can read, thank a teacher. If you can read in English, thank a Marine.

-sunday

Skip Scoop

Hey Everyone! Woody Allen is like the little girl with the curl on her forehead. When he's good, he's very, very good. And when he's bad, he's awful. Yes, you've heard that 1000 times, and that's how hackneyed many of the jokes and one-liners in Scoop feel as well. I went into Scoop with high expectations given that it was his follow up to last year's brilliant Match Point and that it was also set in London and featured Scarlett Johansson. For some reason I feel it is my duty in life to see every Woody Allen movie in the theater. Many of these have paid off, but in the past decade or so, he's had lots of flops.

Scoop could not have been more different than Match Point. It was deliberately distinct in tone, obviously intended to be one of Woody's comedic films. To throw another cliche at you, they say death is easy; comedy is hard. Scoop proves it. I think the time has come for Woody to retire from being in front of the camera. His stammering, stuttering, washed-out presence made Scoop little more than an annoyance. Woody played Sidney, a magician touring London who meets Scarlett's Sandra, an American journalism student, when she is selected to take part in his disappearing act. During this disappearing act, Sondra encounters the ghost of a recently dead reporter (Deadwood's Ian McShane) who gives her a scoop that rich, aristocrat Peter Lyman (Hugh Jackman) is London's notorious Tarot Card Killer.

Got that? My level of suspension of disbelief is such that this concept did not pose a problem for me. I actually didn't mind the ghost. In fact because he was played by McShane, I quite enjoyed him. Just listening to McShane's voice is a pleasure and it was interesting to see him in a modern day role, brief though it was. What I minded was Scoop's flimsy plot, lack of character development and its scattered editing. It felt like Woody was so busy perfecting his dreadful performance that he neglected his directing duties. The film's other oddity was Johansson's appearance. I'm not sure whether the costume designer had a deep-seated dislike of her, a crush on Josh Hartnett or what, but Johansson was made to look as dowdy as possible - scene after scene showed her in unfashionable glasses, ill-fitting shorts, and baggy tops. Her hair was perpetually in a high ponytail covered with a scrunchy of all things. This decision as well as many other made Scoop the movie a much bigger mystery to me than the one ultimately solved on screen.

Before the movie I saw several new previews. The one that stood out the most was Sophia Coppola's Marie Antoinette starring Kirsten Dunst and Jason Schwartzman (Max from Rushmore and Coppola's real life cousin). I am a huge fan of Coppola's films Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation so no matter the reviews, I will go see this movie. That said, the preview was utterly bizarre. The images were gorgeous, the problem was with the sound. This is one of those movies where everyone is speaking English either with a British or French accent, EXCEPT, the star of the movie, Dunst, whose every line sounds like something spoken by a valley girl. It's like she thinks she's in the movie Clueless and everyone else thinks they're on Masterpiece Theatre. I already have to wonder what the heck Coppola was thinking. There's a fabulous story here, but I can already tell it would have been so much better if actual French were spoken. I think audiences (at least those actually willing to see a period film to begin with) are able to accept subtitles. Current release date is 10/20/06.

Boulder Bumpersticker of the Day: Support Your Local Universe.

-sunday