THE TONY AWARDS ARE TONIGHT. This 2004 piece, titled, “There’s No Business Like Tony Awards Business,” by Daniel Okrent, the former ombudsman at the New York Times, is a bracing look at how the foie gras gets made, both on the awards stage, and inside the paper that serves as its advertising house organ:

Unless I acquire some unexpected clout around here in the next 48 hours, Times readers will wake up on Tuesday morning to read a prominent story announcing the nominees for an artistically meaningless, blatantly commercial, shamefully exclusionary and culturally corrosive award competition.

Let me put it another way: unless Times editors have overcome several decades of their own inertia, readers on Tuesday will find a prominent story serving the pecuniary interests of three privately controlled companies whose principals have earned the right to convene in what Damon Runyon once called ”the laughing room.” That was Runyon’s term for the sound-proofed chamber where he imagined that the proprietors of the ”21” Club gathered to set the day’s menu prices. Today’s version would be the sanctum where the men who run the Shubert Organization, the Nederlander Organization and Jujamcyn Theaters gather to toast The Times and its generous support of their efforts.

Those are the three institutions that control Broadway and in turn, along with the sponsors of touring productions of Broadway shows, control the Tony Awards. The Oscars (or Grammys or Pulitzers) of theater the Tonys are not. It may be hard to defend the coverage of something as politicized, commercialized and overhyped as the Oscars, but at least the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences doesn’t limit entrants to films shown only in movie houses of a certain size located in a single neighborhood.

If you’re interested in Broadway, read the whole thing.