2011 Porn Valley Advertiser Appreciation Award season ends

How to fix adult award shows

Another AVN and XBiz Awards season has passed, and we are left wondering why these shows never get any better. They start late and are overlong, they are plagued with technical difficulties, are rarely entertaining, and as a result retain at most 30 percent of their audience.

While many recipients have mastered the art of balancing dignity with what is often a ridiculous situation (“How do you maintain poise when accepting your Best Anal Scene award?” one nominee said), the cobbled-together nature of every adult award show—ever—unfailingly presents the adult industry in a bad light.

This can be fixed.

1. Enforce the start time. Hollywood does it; why can’t Porn? If Charlie Sheen can show up on time for the Emmys, so can the Best Contract Star nominees.

1a. Open the doors 45 minutes before showtime. This provides a limited time to mingle and get drinks.

2. Reduce the categories awarded at the show. Even pornographers can sit through 20 awards. The rest can be announced online the day before and picked up at the AVN or XBiz offices, or the Big Boy adjacent, the week after the show.

3. Hire a host/comedian who knows the adult industry and can talk about individuals rather than perpetuating old jokes about the porn business in general. No one benefited from the presence of Lisa Lampanelli at the AVN Awards or Whitney Cummings at XBiz; audience and comedienne were mismatched in both cases.

4. Entice presenters with cash; they will learn their lines.

5. Hire a real director.

A lot of money is spent on adult awards shows, but rarely do presenters behave as if this is part of their job. Why is that?

“I got up to the microphone and everyone was down there milling around, walking in and out of the room,” one XBiz presenter said. “I wanted to tell people to shut up.”

“She’s up there talking and I can tell she’s high, or on new meds, or something, and I can’t hear her anyway,” said an AVN Awards guest of a presenter.

So if the presenters don’t care and the audience doesn’t care, why have awards shows at all?

“Because I work hard,” one actor said.

“Because we’ve bailed out that magazine for years,” one studio press agent said.

*****

The tough thing about adult awards is that the right person, movie, or company gets them now and then, thus fucking up the general understanding that they are fixed.

While January’s AVN Awards in Las Vegas are often called “The Oscars of Porn,” there is no real Hollywood equivalent for the XBiz Awards, which were presented Wednesday night at Hollywood’s Palladium. That is why they are called the Pro Bowl of adult awards shows.

It is unclear whether an AVN or XBiz award boosts sales, but they are a huge boost to the ego and sense of accomplishment of an individual performer.

I had a conversation with an actor back in October. He was thinking about leaving the adult industry because “AVN turned its back on me; no one knows who I am.” Neither of these things were true, of course, as AVN had given him a big award within the past couple of years and everyone knows who he is. But the other night he won an XBiz Award and he feels validated again.

“All my hard work paid off,” he told me.

Awards are important in such a small industry, and I’d suggest that for individuals they mean even more. But for companies or studios, they are just as often a grateful acknowledgment that the checks keep clearing.

And a trade magazine feels compelled to host awards as a sign of its own legitimacy, even if those awards often overlap. [April’s XRCO Awards, chosen by unaligned critics, feature a show that is just as big a clusterfuck as the AVN or XBiz events, but it somehow feels more wholesome.]

I have been privy to awards negotiations at both AVN and XBiz and there is often genuine agonizing over the question of who will win over who should, and genuine relief when that entity is one and the same.

And what would you do if you owned or were employed by a trade publication that depended on advertising? You would add as many awards as it would take to please as many people as possible, and you’d still have to deal with people bitching the next day.

So, while I’m happy when the right people (in my opinion) win, the thing that has kept me from attending the last several years of AVN Awards and Wednesday’s XBiz awards is that neither organization has yet learned how to produce its own awards show to make it—and, by reflection, the adult industry—look good.

[Title picture from the first and only Temptation Awards in 2006]

Previously on Porn Valley Observed: XBiz Awards—”The Pond gets smaller so the fish get bigger”; Tweets from another casino; Will there be another Temptation Awards?
See also: List of 2011 AVN Award winners, List of 2011 XBiz Award winners