The Emmys go down in flames

Well not really, but they did spark a bit of controversy when the show opened with host Conan O'Brien in a skit where his aeroplane goes down, just a few hours after a commercial airliner went down in Kentucky, killing all but one passenger.

There's no real joke there, except the cosmic one that the Emmys have become. With so many awards and so many winners, getting an Emmy is not as hard as it looks. I myself was up for Best Blogger to Just Miss Making an Appearance on a Moderately Watched Televised Exhibition Match, for my offscreen performance at the Chelsea vs. DC United match last August...it was awarded right after Best Actress in a Comedy, and right before Best Hairstyle in a Rock Mockumentary...anyway, I lost to Herb Schlossman of Topeka, Kansas, who just missed getting on camera during the College World Series in Omaha, Nebraska.

However, even worse is the Emmy's abysmal timing. During the 70's they did a skit with Tony Randall as a radical who kidnaps a very confused Bea Arthur and locks her in a very neat closet. Just hours later Patty Hearst was kidnapped by the Siamese Liberation Army. (Editor's Note: Hearst was actually kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, and Bea Arthur was kidnapped by a very sloppy Jack Krugman, who then offered to show her his "cigar collection." I still have nightmares.)

Then in 1984, host Henry Winkler was in a skit about an sprints and jumps athlete who won a bevy of medals at the Olympics and could also turn on a jukebox with a rap of his fist. Carl Lewis was so despondent over the way in which this skit took off the sheen of his own 4 gold medal winning performance in Los Angeles (and over the fact that he couldn't do the jukebox thingy) that he embarked on a acting career, just to punish the rest of us.

So, having planned a skit involving an airliner crash and then having an actual airliner crash on the day of the programme is pretty typical of the Emmy's run of luck. Of course, they could have just cancelled the bit and gone straight to the big show. That would have knocked the running time down by 5 minutes and gotten the programme under 13 hours. (There's a very good reason we don't do a Live Emmys Blog here.)

Meanwhile, 24 and The Office won a yachtload of awards. Keifer Sutherland won something, which I didn't think possible a decade ago but am now happy to admit that he at least deserves an Emmy. (That sounds quite harsh when I read it back, though.) Julia Louis-Dreyfus won an award, but almost forgot to thank husband Brad Hall, who couldn't be there because he was slaving away at the Huffington Post on a blog entry about how Donald Rumsfeld is poisoning the Miss Universe pageant process. Lost was shut out for the most part, and yet again the Academy of Television Sciences and Oprah (the name was changed in 1997 to reflect Oprah's influence on American television...quite frankly, I think they should just shorten it to the Academy of Oprah) neglected to honor America's Wildest Police Chases...the philistines!

Perhaps next year.