The First Annual GCG Pop Culture Awards

In which I make up categories as it suits me and distribute awards entirely at random.

MUSIC AWARDS

“Come on Eileen” Award for Most Inane, Repetitive, Inescapable Song of 2010
I Gotta Feeling by the Black Eyed Peas.

Critical Masturbation Award for Most Boring Record That Critics Inexplicably Loved
Lisbon by the Walkmen.

Most Essential Downtime in a Song
The eight measures in Kanye West’s “Monster” immediately following Nicky Minaj’s verse, allowing you to pick yourself up off the floor from the awesome, awesome, awesomeness.

Best New Genre Award
Prog-rap, the definitive text for which is of course Kanye West’s big, bold, mind-blowing My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. Kanye should collaborate with Rush, because if there’s one thing better than a prog-rock steampunk concept album, it’s a prog-rap steampunk concept album.

FILM AWARDS

Pirates of the Caribbean Award for Terrible Film I’m Nonetheless Glad Exists Because of the Awesome Kermodean Rant It Inspired
Sex and the City 2. Witness the glory.

Crank: High Voltage Award for Most Ridiculously Fun Cinematic Experience
Piranha 3D.

3 Most Rage-Inducing Film Posters of 2010
(3) Gulliver’s Travels; (2) Vampires Suck; (1) that one Katherine Heigl movie with the grown man dressed like a baby.

Fish Tank / An Education Joint Award for Best Unintentional Double Bill
Catfish & The Social Network.

Bad Filmgoer Award for Terrible Alternate Version of Great Film I Kind of Want to See
The great film: Of Gods and Men. The terrible alternate version I kind of want to see: Uwe Boll’s Monks Vs. Terrorists.

Alison Bechdel Award for Most Feminist Film / Cagney & Lacey Award for Most Subtexty Film
Whip It.

Top Ten Films
In the order I saw them, because that’s just how I roll:
Ponyo
Shutter Island
Kick-Ass
Four Lions
Inception
Toy Story 3
Scott Pilgrim
The Social Network
Monsters
Of Gods and Men

BAD FEMINIST AWARDS

Bad Feminist Award for D00dliest Top Ten Film List
Me. Look at that Top Ten. There’s, like, two female characters total in all those films.

Bad Feminist Award for Film I’m Most Ashamed That I Didn’t See
Made in Dagenham. Missing it makes me feel like a bad feminist, a bad filmgoer, and a bad member of the Kermode nation.

Bad Feminist Award for Film I Feel Guilty About Not Really Liking
Winter’s Bone. Directed by a woman, starring a woman, highly acclaimed, hella boring.

Bad Feminist All-Round Award
Sex & the City 2. By all accounts, the movie’s portrayal of women is as problematic as its attitude toward class issues and race issues, but the discourse around it has been hideously misogynistic.

TELEVISION AWARDS

Buffy S8 Award for Series I Should Have Ditched Long Before I Actually Did
The League, which I watched for a season and a half in a vain attempt to discover why my equal-parts-loved-and-hated AV Club thinks it’s so great; I saw only a mean-spirited, misogynistic, unfunny show, like an incompetently executed answer to It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Even the unearthly attractiveness of Katie Aselton couldn’t keep me at this show.
Honorable Mention: Mike & Molly, which started out surprisingly sweet and charming, but has gotten lazier and more reliant on hoary clichés week by week, to the point that I will definitely not be coming back in January.

Best TV Show of 2010
COMMUNITY, BITCHES

Best Comeback From A Show I Feared Might Be In Irreversible Decline
It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, which recovered from a patchy fifth season and a lacklustre two-part season opener to deliver a sixth season whose highs stand among the show’s finest moments.

Car Crash Television Award
Running Wilde. Mitchell Hurwitz, Will Arnett, David Cross – with the amount of goodwill guaranteed this show from still-mourning Arrested Development fans, it was going to have to be really terrible in order to squander it. It was.
Honorable Mention: Glee, of course.

Firefly Award for Most Lamented Single-Season Show
Terriers. TV gods, you owe me one. I expect at least a third season of Community for this.

BOOK AWARDS

The Amber Spyglass Award for Most Uncontrollable Weeping Induced by the Final Volume of a YA Trilogy
Since I failed to bottle my tears for an exact comparison, I’m going to have to declare it a tie between Mockingjay, the final volume of Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy, and Monsters of Men, which concludes Patrick Ness’ Chaos Walking trilogy. Maybe I will even do a compare-and-contrast of the two series.

SILLY AWARDS

Robert Browning Award for Unintentionally Hilarious Word Usage
The Last Airbender, which was nowhere near as painful as I’d been led to expect, thanks largely to the giggle factor of lines such as “There are some powerful benders in the northern water tribes” (plus the ever-amusing spectacle of Aasif Mandvi making a fool of himself).

Amanda Seyfried Award for Blonde Lady I Find Stunningly Attractive Despite Not On The Whole Preferring Blondes
Whitney Able in Monsters. Like Ms Seyfried, she looks better in motion than in still photographs, because she has a luminous quality that lights up the screen.

Bad American Accent Award (Film Edition)
Aaron Johnson in Kick-Ass. He comes so close to getting it right, until he starts talking about “supaheroes”. Bless.

Bad American Accent Award (TV Edition)
Olivia Williams in that one episode of Terriers. I love you, Ms Williams, but wow can you ever not do an American accent.
Honorable Mention: Gabrielle Anwar on Burn Notice seems to be getting lazier with her fake American accent, but since the character’s supposed to be faking the accent I’ll let it slide. If there’s a similar excuse for Archie Panjabi’s similarly dodgy accent on The Good Wife, we haven’t heard it yet.

Fall TV

I love the fall TV season. The buzz and anticipation surrounding new shows; the looking forward to returning favorites; the obsessive comparing of personal and critical reactions to the major pilots – it’s all very intense, very geeky, and a lot of fun.

The disappointments are as much a part of it as the good stuff. There’s the inevitable batch of cringeworthy sitcoms, few of which are likely to see in the new year; the critically acclaimed but entirely unwatched show that gets canceled after two episodes (farewell, Lone Star; we hardly knew ye); the new show from Arrested Development alumni, which never had a chance of living up to the weight of expectations; the turgid sci-fi drama you wanted to like, but just couldn’t.

This is a period of ups and downs, of surprise delights and unforeseen let-downs, a time when all the new shows are in fierce contest for a voice and an audience. In a few weeks, we’ll know for certain which nonessential shows we should drop from our overcrowded viewing schedule, which sleeper hits turn out to be unexpectedly enchanting, and which worlds cancelation or quality decline will make us regret falling in love with; a year from now, many of the titles we discuss will provoke nary a flicker of recognition. But for now, we’ll have our fun.

Fall 2010 is not looking like an especially memorable season so far. Compared with last year – which brought us a unique dramedy in the ubiquitous Glee, an old-fashioned sitcom with a contemporary twist in Modern Family, and the absolutely terrific Community – the new crop of shows looks pretty unexciting. Apart from Boardwalk Empire and the late lamented Lone Star, nothing has really gotten the critical saliva gushing, and the majority of the new shows can be described as nothing more flattering than “watchable”.

In terms of diversity on television, however, a couple of potentially quite exciting things are happening. While Glee, Modern Family, and Community were and remain self-conscious about the diversity of their respective ensemble casts, they still have a tendency to foreground the straight white people and give their minority characters short shrift: Glee’s main character is straight white Rachel, Community’s is straight white Jeff, and Modern Family is just now starting to address the problems in its portrayal of its gay couple.

Now, Undercovers gives us a main couple of characters who are both non-white and happily married. Mike & Molly is a surprisingly funny sitcom about two overweight people, who are (for the most part) portrayed as sympathetic and complex human beings, not just walking slapstick factories. It’s not that much to go on, but it gives me hope because both these shows are offering something that the rest simply aren’t. An action-adventure series whose leads happen to be African-American? A show – ANY show – whose main characters are plus-sized? In a country where ethnic minorities constitute over a third of the population, obese people are almost as many, and the demographics in TV shows are obscenely skewed toward thin white people, every step in the right direction is something to be celebrated.