Globes: Start your own awards group!
Hey, everybody! Want to hang out with, say, Lindsay Lohan for an evening? Then throw together a group of friends and call yourselves the Consortium for Aesthetic Appreciation or some such and rent out a nice hall and hire a caterer (it doesn't even have to be a good one) and contact Lindsay's people and tell them you want to give her your prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award. You might even be able to score Michael Keaton or Jamie Lee Curtis or Hilary Duff (well, probably not her) to give appreciative speeches.
That's pretty much how these other awards groups, particularly the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, did it.
For further info, check out (if you can find it) "The Golden Globes: Hollywood's Dirty Little Secret," a bitchy but fairly accurate history of the HFPA that aired on Trio, a cable network so good that of course Jeff Zucker had to kill it off. The HFPA's Globes had little clout and rarely attracted A-list celebrities until they moved their ceremony to January, where it became an influential benchmark for Motion Picture Academy members who wanted to vote but were too lazy to actually sit through all those movies. It was a genius move, and they've been reaping the benefits ever since -- celebrities faun over them until the night of the Globes, when it's vice versa.
Everyone else in Hollywood kind of smacked their foreheads in that 'Wow -- I could've had a V-8' way and has recently scrambled to try to replicate the Globes' success, to little or no avail -- have you even HEARD of the Silver Satellites? (They gave their best picture award to Pleasantville a few years back after being assured someone'd show up.) AFI and the Broadcast Critics tried airing their awards ceremonies, to monumental yawns from the rest of America (it didn't help that virtually none of the winners showed up for AFI's kudocast).
Let's face it -- as much as Hollywood celebrities love to receive awards, the rest of the country generally has better things to do. They've already decided which awards shows merit their time -- Oscars, Globes, Emmys, Grammys -- so all these upstarts trying to hop on the bandwagon today shouldn't waste their breath. If you want to meet a celebrity, spring for a drink at the Standard.
