JERRY SEINFELD SLAMS HOLLYWOOD AWARD SHOWS AS ‘HORSE SH*T:’ ‘Is There Anything Stupider?’
“That’s why, you know, all these stupid singing shows and talent shows. We like to try and break people. Is there anything stupider than an award show?” he began.
“We’re gonna compete. These two movies are gonna compete. What do you mean compete? It’s not two horses, you know, it’s two movies. How can you say, we’re gonna say this one is better? You can’t, it’s fake. It’s horse shit,” Seinfeld joked.
Host Dax Shepard joined in, agreeing with Seinfeld and questioning how the movies are evaluated.
“Yeah. One came out like two weeks before Christmas. You’re already in a great mood. You evaluated this movie like — with Christmas cheer. What do we do with that? We gonna factor for that when we evaluate these movies?” Shepard said.
“Yeah. And these stupid people, myself, I’ve been sat there like an idiot at these award shows, and we’re gonna put a camera on ’em and we’re gonna watch ’em win and lose. It’s so completely contrived. There is no real competition,” Seinfeld replied.
“It’s like two tomato sauces competing,” he continued. “You can’t — they’re just different tomato sauce. What do you mean? We’re gonna — best picture. What a stupid phrase. Best actor. Best what? For who? When?
“No, it’s preposterous,” Shepard agreed.
“They’re doing different parts. It’s so stupid,” Seinfeld concluded.
The Academy Awards were originally useful to Hollywood in the late 1920s to add an additional sheen to the business, just as talking pictures began. In the 1998 A&E documentary version of Neal Gabler’s excellent 1989 book, An Empire of their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, the narrator (actor R.H. Thomson) notes that after being unable to break the monopoly that east coast-based Thomas Edison had on moviemaking at the start of the 20th century, the largely Jewish immigrants who created what we now call Hollywood went west, both for the excellent weather that allowed them to film outdoors throughout most of the year, and for the freedom to build, as Gabler dubbed it in his title, “An Empire of their Own,” far from Edison’s (often anti-Semitic) control. Eventually, with 75 percent of the public going to the movies at least once a week between the wars:
Actors became the gods and goddesses of the new American religion. And where there are new gods, there must be new idols. So the studio heads began a movie guild with the lofty title of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. It was [MGM’s Louis B.] Mayer’s brilliant idea [in 1929] to create the Oscars, where the movie moguls could honor themselves by giving each other awards. In this way, they went from being a group of immigrant Jews, to award-winning American producers.
Not to mention, as one biographer quoted Mayer, “I found that the best way to handle [filmmakers] was to hang medals all over them. […] If I got them cups and awards they’d kill themselves to produce what I wanted. That’s why the Academy Award was created.”