Hilarious commentary from McClatchy:
Sunday night’s telecast of the 60th Annual Emmy Awards set a new standard for awards shows. You could take every elephant Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus owns, feed them rancid chili and spoiled boiled eggs for a month, and they could not create a bigger stinker.
It wasn’t who won the awards. The Emmy voters correctly heaped praise on “John Adams,” “Recount,” “Mad Men” and “Damages.” There were few categories where the most worthy did not shine. Even the little-seen work of Bryan Cranston on the AMC series “Breaking Bad” caught the attention of the voters.
But draped around the awards, like an infected fungus, were the idiotic opening, the rambling acceptance speeches in the first 90 minutes and a musical number that could have killed a career.
And it all started in the opening moments when the Television Academy of Arts and Sciences bowed down to Oprah Winfrey. They allowed the daytime talk show host to open the program by doing a stilted reading of a speech about why we need television. You think Winfrey could at least fake that she cares. The speech went beyond self-indulgent to completely boring. Tom Cruise needed to rush out and jump up and down on the stage to put some life in the show.
More fun stuff from The Oregonian:
Other than that, the three-hour Emmy presentation was not only awful, but gratingly so. Poorly conceived, badly executed, a failure by every possible aesthetic and (I’d argue) commercial standard.
It’s hard to know where to begin. Probably at the beginning, with Oprah Winfrey’s alarmingly self-adoring intro. All due respect to Oprah, who after all invented movable type, representational democracy and lollipops. But when she compliments herself (not inaccurately, either) for being a one-person sustainer of American literacy, it would be nice if she didn’t hold for her applause until the audience actually begins applauding.
Still, Oprah’s need for affirmation barely registered when measured against the endless, and endlessly unamusing, shtick by the five co-emcees, all of them nominees in the night’s reality show host category.
And the NY Times has this bit:
Oddly, there were not many jokes about Governor Palin. Ryan Seacrest, one of the M.C.’s, who also interviewed Ms. Fey for the red-carpet ceremony on E!, didn’t even mention the actress’s recent impersonation of the Alaska governor on “Saturday Night Live.” At the end, Ms. Fey thanked Mr. Seacrest for not mentioning Ms. Palin. “I was told not to,” he replied flatly.
It could be that Hollywood stars are afraid to further inflame the right by being snooty about their gun-toting heroines. Or they worry about their own glass houses. It seems that qualifications aren’t a big deal in show business, either: even Lauren Conrad, a cast member of the reality show “The Hills,” was a presenter.
Laura Linney, however, had the lefty line of the night:
“I just have the most tremendous respect for anyone who serves their community,” Linney said. “Our founding fathers were community organizers. And that is fact to me. And I feel that has been disparaged.”