Hooray to Mel Brooks...and some assholes and nobodies

Awards, awards, is there anyone who DOESN'T have an award?

Surely, you've got one for something. EVERYONE has some medal, button, plaque, piece of paper, trophy or ribbon proclaiming SOME kind of achievement.

Some of this shit ends up in a closet and most of it eventually goes for landfill.

A few days ago the idiotic Emmy Awards were handed out to a whole bunch of nobodies and no-talents. Some of the worst performers and writers got a chance to grin and fist-pump and give speeches for crap that most of the planet could care less about.

The other day, 90 year-old Mel Brooks got some kind of medal from Obama. Huh? What IS this?

Brooks is one of the rare humans to own an OSCAR, EMMY, TONY and GRAMMY, and he probably has a bunch of other awards as well. There's the Kennedy Honors, the Medal of Freedom, and on and on, with the government having no shortage of trinkets to hand out. The "Medal of Arts" is now something he can put on the shelf with the other stuff? SO?

It would mean a bit more of the morons didn't hand out nearly TWO DOZEN of them the same afternoon.

What the award represented, nobody seemed to know.

People couldn't even understand what Mel did when he GOT the mdeal!

Half the media insisted Mel Brooks tried to pull down Obama's pants!

No, when Obama hung this clunky gigantic medal around Mel's neck, Mel pretended it was heavy, and that he was collapsing under its weight. That's all.

IF I'M BEING HONEST, it was a bit ridiculous for Obama to only mention "Blazing Saddles." Yes, it was a film about a BLACK sheriff cleaning up a racist town. But it was also an overblown sitcom that is best known for fart jokes.

The whole event was ridiculous. Mel Brooks was one of nearly TWO DOZEN people "honored" with awards. Obama probably spent an hour putting these medals and ribbons around the necks of pretty ordinary people that NOBODY has heard of.

Doubt me?

This bogus honor, the "National Medal of the Arts" also went to:

► Novelist and poet Sandra Cisneros, of San Antonio, Texas. (WHO?)

► The Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Conn. (WHAT, a building??)

► Playwright Moises Kaufman of New York. (Can you name one of his plays?)

► Choreographer Ralph Lemon of New York (Of interest to affluent gays only)

► Actress and singer Audra McDonald of Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y. (The black-singer du jour)

► Playwright and director Luis Valdez of San Juan Bautista, Calif. (Gotta have a LAH-TEEEEE-NO)

► Abstract visual artist Jack Whitten of New York. (No, I don't know any of his paintings either)

Some other variation, the "National Medal of the Humanities" went to:

► Author Rudolfo Anaya of Albuquerque, N.M. (WHO?)

► Chef José Andrés of Bethesda, Md. (WHY? AND NO, NEVER HEARD OF HIM

► Author Ron Chernow of New York. (Go into a bookstore and mention his name. See the blank looks)

► Poet Louise Glück of Cambridge, Mass. (Oooh, a POET)

► Radio host Terry Gross of Philadelphia. (Sort of Parkinson for the blind. So what. She talks to celebrities on PBS)

► Author James McBride of Lambertville, N.J. (Even his own librarian doesn't know him)

► Author Louis Menand of Cambridge, Mass. (Even his own mother doesn't know him)

► Historian Elaine Pagels of Princeton, N.J. (Can you get more obscure?)

► The Prison University Project in San Quentin, Calif. (Yawn.)

► Physician Abraham Verghese of Menlo Park, Calif. (A lot of doctors in the world.)

► Journalist Isabel Wilkerson of Atlanta, Ga. (Writing for WHAT paper??)

To give you an idea of how UNIMPORTANT this event was, the only two people besides Mel Brooks that anyone might've heard of, did NOT bother to show up: Wynton Marsalis who gets all this attention because he happens to be a BLACK guy who sometimes plays classical music, and Morgan Freeman (yeah, he has a nice voice, but he's JUST an actor. Except he's also a BLACK actor).

Oh. Another guy SOME people may have heard of showed up: Berry Gordy. Billed as a "music pioneer," did he also pioneer stiffing the songwriters and performers as much as possible? Paying attention to female singers who put out for him?

Last and very least, Philip Glass showed up to get yet another honor for being a "classical" composer that almost NOBODY likes. Who the FUCK listens to this guy's music? There's some kind of fucking obligation to make a big deal off of SOMEBODY who writes modern classical music, and it's usual him. PS, that little melody he tossed into a Paul Simon song wasn't so memorable either.

Bottom line, there's a shortage of talent and of interesting works of art, but NO shortage of AWARDS.

► Motown music pioneer Berry Gordy of Los Angeles.