It’s that time of year again- the Hollywood award season- whereby producers, writers, directors, actors and other craftspeople come together to honor one another in great style for their contributions to the world of media as we know it today. According to Tom O’Neil, America’s leading awards expert and founder of GoldDerby.com, 4,000 award ceremonies are held each year to honor this industry alone. And he should know he’s been tracking show results and making predictions on the competitions since 2000 while penning three books on the subject and blogging for the LA Times’ TheEnvelope.com.

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Unfortunately, with so many ceremonies to watch and so many opinions to account for, often times the lines between the intentions of the awards are blurred. But last year, I was asked to cover the PRISM Awards, a jewel of an honor presented by the Entertainment Industry Council (EIC) for the accurate depiction of substance abuse and mental health issues within television and film productions. The storylines are mostly heavy and often controversial, but more importantly, they touch the reality of average people’s lives. Actors are not measured against one another based on genre, but rather as they compare to a real person afflicted with an illness such as alcoholism, drug addiction, bi-polar disorders, etc. One Tree Hill actress, Shantel VanStaten, had this to say about the PRISM, “I think its one of the highest honors you can get. It’s not ‘oh you did an amazing job’ —  it’s ‘you did the most realistic portrayal of something that we could find’.”

The EIC was founded in 1987 by Brian Dyak, and the first PRISM Award was presented ten years later as a direct result of the progress the EIC had made. “The PRISM Awards encourage creators to make the most of their rights to free creative expression, while at the same time showing the reality of these health issues,” Dyak said of his coveted award. “As a part of the industry, EIC never wants to inhibit the creative process; however, we take pride in being the first to applaud creators who use their power and influence over their audiences wisely and responsibly, informing them while at the same time entertaining them. This is what we refer to as “the art of making a difference,” and that is what EIC and the PRISM Awards are all about.”

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So let’s say you’re at some restaurant, enjoying your chai tea and veggie burger, reading a worn out copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves, and in a booth nearby you hear a father and son arguing. The conversation gets nasty, as the pop says, “There are solutions to this!  No son of mine is going to be gay!”

So what do you do? Well, an ABC show is named exactly that – and the father and son are actually actors fabricating this scene, waiting to see if someone like you will intervene.

It’s a morality experiment: the man berates his son for being gay – and if you don’t do anything – well, you’re just an awful, cowardly homophobe. Later, the performers question bystanders as to why they didn’t interrupt, and of course are judged for lack of involvement.

In a word, this is “riyeht,” which is Vulcan for crap.

I’ll tell you why: these conflicts never happen in public. Look, I pretty much sleep in bars – so I know this. So why build hypothetical situations based on scenes that only happen in corny made-for-TV movies made a decade ago?

Cuz it’s easy: All the network is doing is staging gay bullying stuff because these days, it makes for easy, manufactured outrage. I doubt they’d create a scenario where a tea partier is called a Nazi, or a police officer is labeled a fascist – because that just doesn’t make for a romantic stunt. (more…)

You may not know who Matt Long is but you might have seen the young actor in recent advertisements for his new ABC television show “The Deep End.” Long has appeared in a couple of major motion pictures including “Ghost Rider” and “Sydney White” but he will likely gain more notice for his new role on a disappointing television show that Variety.com noted is little more than a sibling show to “Grey’s Anatomy,” about lawyers instead of doctors. It is disappointing to see the engaging Matt Long is on a show like this, especially considering that he did far superior work on television several years ago on the WB program “Jack and Bobby.”

On his new show, Long plays Dylan Hewitt, a new idealistic associate at a law firm. The show revolves around a group of young lawyers finding themselves in “the deep end” of their profession as they start working full time in “the real world.” The first episode of the series showed the young characters dealing with work dilemmas that law school did not prepare them for.  For instance, Hewitt had to fight for a mother to gain custody of her child against the wishes of his tough boss, played by Billy Zane. Hewitt is tempted to do the wrong thing in the case but inevitably he decides to do what is right for the child, a cliched plotline that falls flat. (more…)

According to studio estimates, Watchmen (Warner Bros) will finish the weekend with an estimated $55.65M. After seizing $4.5M in Thursday midnight business, there were rumblings about $29M on opening day and an opening weekend of $70M+. When the picture scored a lesser but still good $25.2M Friday, weekend estimates were revised downward. As of Saturday morning, my projection was for $57M, and Watchmen came in even lower than that.

Zack Snyder’s adaptation of Alan Moore’s densely written graphic novel tumbled 24% from Friday to Saturday. Granted, midnight shows took a lot of steam out of the movie, but that’s a pretty significant fall given that the Males 25 Plus demo – a key one for this film – were not likely part of the Thursday fanboy crowd and, despite the current unemployment rate, were working on Friday.

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Hollywood execs seem to be waking up to the power of women at America’s multiplexes. The success of He’s Just Not That Into You (Warner Bros) and this weekend’s Confessions of a Shopaholic (Disney) can be traced to Meryl Streep’s witty riff on the tyrannical Anna Wintour in The Devil Wears Prada in the summer of 2006. Prada opened to a $27.5M weekend on its way to a $124.75M domestic cume (Streep also earned an Oscar nomination).

Then in July of 2007, New Line grabbed an almost identical $27.47M with the opening weekend of the female-skewing Hairspray, translating to $118.87M domestic. Also Enchanted, starring Amy Adams, was a hit for Disney over the holidays reaching $127.8M domestic.

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