Awards, Honors and other Hollywood Nonsense

Paul Cappitelli

Once again it is awards season in Hollywood, where hardware is handed out and acceptance speeches filled with the ramblings of elites who forget to pay homage to those who truly are responsible for their immense wealth and success, the regular Joe’s and Jane’s who pay to see them on the big and little screens. Oft times these award events are used as pulpits for the political rants and diatribes against our current administration, policies, and Americans who are supportive of them.

In honor of this award giving season I will now announce my first annual “Foot in Mouth” awards, dedicated to those in the entertainment industry who have proven them selves to be among the past years most ridiculous political pundits. These awards will affectionately be known as the Fouth awards, and the criteria for winning these never-to-be-famous awards will be judged on actions, comments, and number of times a celebrity has embarrassed the confines of common sense and good judgment.

As so often happens when a conservative is in the highest office, our celebrity friends have provided a litany of qualified candidates, and I want to start by saying I am sorry I could not give out more then my own predetermined number of awards. So without further ado, let’s get started.

The runner-up award for Worst Fouth Actor goes to Johnny Depp, for his slanderous attack on America in the German news magazine Stern, while hiding in southern France.

“America is dumb, it's like a dumb puppy that has big teeth that can bite and hurt you, aggressive… My daughter is four, my boy is one. I'd like them to see America as a toy, a broken toy. Investigate it a little, check it out, get this feeling and then get out.”

Of course Johnny himself loves to come back to America to earn millions of dollars off of the hardworking Americans who pay to see his movies. Still that is not good enough to earn him my top honor, that goes too…..

The award for Worst Fouth Actor goes to Sean Penn. His ability to make a fool of himself started innocently enough as the partying surfer Jeff Spicoli in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High”, but has fully blossomed into cavorting with the former despotic regime of Saddam Hussein. In attempting to quell the criticism he admits he knew was coming in the aftermath of his infamous trip he even went to the trouble of spending $125,000 of his own money to take a full page ad out in the New York Times to defend himself. He spent four and a half times the yearly disposable income for the average American as of December of 2003 to write statements like this.

“…that same flag that took me so long to love, respect, and protect, threatens to become a haunting banner of murder, greed, and treason against our principles, honored history, Constitution, and our own mothers and fathers.”

He also was one of many Hollywood elites found of criticizing from afar when he claimed “I am sure I am more patriotic than the current president we have in the United States," while speaking at a Donostia awards ceremony in Spain.

Now it is time to move on to the female portion of our awards ceremony, and we will start by honoring the runner-up Worst Fouth Actress winner, Susan Sarandon, with her thoughts on British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

“I don't understand his reasoning or his logic. I don't understand his evolution. I can see him being seduced by Bill Clinton but don't understand what him and Bush speak about.”

I am still trying to figure out if she was saying that President Bush had brain washed Tony Blair, or if she thought he was an intern working at the White House, either way she is my runner-up for 2003.

We now honor the Worst Fouth Actress of the year winner, Janeane Garofalo. The trouble with giving this award out was not in choosing who to give it too, but in choosing from the plethora of inane comments that she bestowed upon us all of last year. After careful consideration I chose the following two quips to share.

“The Republican Party, their message and their policies of exclusion and the tilted playing field appeals to the dumb and the mean. There is no shortage of dumb and mean people in this culture. So, therefore, their message, the dumb and the mean find a nice home in the GOP.”

Her comments at New York City’s 92nd Street Y on 06/20/03 show her propensity to generalize millions of Americans as dumb and mean, based entirely on their party affiliation. If that were true, she would be chairman of the party as her comments were ‘dumb and mean’.

“Yet at the same time he is asking us to drop bombs on Iraqi civilians. According to the United Nations, up to 1 million people will be killed and/or wounded in this war.”

In her interview with Howard Curtz 01/26/03, she shows that she is a spinster, albeit a poor one at that. One might think that she was bombed when making her comments most of last year, and who could blame her, since her career seems to be in a tailspin.

The final Fouth award I will be handing out is the Lifetime Fouth Award dedicated to the celebrity who has shown a long history of making irrational comments and for making a career out of inane “punditocrity”, to quote Janeane Garofalo. Competition for the lifetime Fouth Award was fierce between Ed Asner and Michael Moore, but in the end Michael Moore’s propensity to make slanderous and false comments along with his outright bigoted depiction of Americans of all classes and for his falsely categorized documentary “Bowling for Columbine”, which should have included the warning ‘Comments, Quotes, and footage, should not necessarily be viewed as fact or in correct context’, made him the winner of this prestigious award.

So there you have it, the 2003 winners of the first annual Fouth awards. I would like to give a hearty thank you to all the celebrities who made 2003 a great year for the Foot in Mouth disease.