Television Without Pity 2006-2007 Tubey Awards: Tubey Awards of Questionable Cachet

INCLUDING THE AWARD FOR "BEST FAKE '80S-STYLE MUSIC VIDEO GENERATED FOR A SITCOM: Ah, it's TWoP's Tubey Awards season again, with sections including the reader vote-based Memorable Moments and Thingies, The Montgomery Burns Awards for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence, and The Biggies, plus the staff's Tubey Awards of Questionable Cachet, which includes this post's title and....

The Dr. Nikolas Van Helsing Memorial Award
What does every rich person need? An enabling medical doctor. And that's why Dr. Leo Spaceman, physician to 30 Rock's Tracy Jordan and Jack Donaghy, is this year's recipient of an award given to MDs who remind us that medicine isn't an exact science, but a frustrating venture that must continue even after the powerful bread lobby shuts down your groundbreaking studies. Now, who wants some reds and purples?

Sean Young still can't catch a break | Sean Young | Movie News | Movies | Entertainment Weekly | 1

"I'M NOT JULIA ROBERTS. AND I COULD HAVE BEEN": Entertainment Weekly catches up with actress Sean Young.

ANY PLACE THAT INSPIRED SONGS BY LOU REED, TOM WAITS, AND DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE MUST BE IMPORTANT: This week's news that Astroland, the Coney Island amusement park, may well be closing for good prompted a wave of nostalgia for Coney Island's supposed glory years. But Astroland dates only to 1962, and even the Cyclone, the park's signature coaster, is just eighty years old (a mere blink of the eye to us historians). For the true heyday of Coney Island, you really need to go all the way back to the turn of the 20th century, the era covered in John Kasson's marvelous book, Amusing the Million.

Kasson argues that urban recreation in Victorian America tended toward the "genteel" and the "rational," as exemplified by Central Park in New York and the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. But the amusement parks at Coney Island -- Steeplechase Park (1895), Luna Park (1903), and Dreamland (1904) -- provided a much different sort of public recreation. At these stunning new attractions, visitors of all classes could escape to an exotic world of sensation, excitement, and wonder, where for a few hours they could freely ignore the normal rules of everyday life.

A day at Coney Island offered an astonishing variety of entertainments to choose from. You could cavort on the beach, flirting with total strangers in revealing swimwear (scandalous!); you could enjoy a whole host of thrill rides, from "shoot-the-chutes" to the roller coaster; you could stay until dark and gape at the spectacular electric-light displays. Kasson argues that the Coney Island parks "manufactured the carnival spirit": they allowed turn-of-the-century New Yorkers to throw off social conventions and cultural norms for a brief time, before returning to the industrial-corporate order of the workweek.

A century later, however, even that limited feeling of communal rebellion has disappeared from today's massive theme parks, with their corporate management, synergistic cross-promotions, and hefty admission prices. And as the Astroland story suggests, the independent amusement park is a dying breed. Yet summer after summer, we keep coming back to these places. Why? At a time when we can amuse ourselves so easily on our various private screens (TVs, computers, iPods, video games), what kind of amusement can we get at an amusement park that we can't get anyplace else?

Next week: vaudeville, ragtime, Tin Pan Alley, and the birth of the movies.

GIVE ALL THE LeROYS TO THE LITTLE RICH BOYS: I hate to link to stories in the Wall Street Journal because of the whole paid-subscription issue, but this one is too bizarre to pass up. Apparently the new new niche among collectors of expensive artwork is children. Children such as nine-year-old Dakota King, who has been collecting since she was four and about whom one gallery owner effused, "she has such a great eye for art." Or eleven-year-old Charlie Rosen, who has decorated his room with Warhol drawings of airplanes and who recently spent $352,000 at a Sotheby's auction to buy a Jeff Koons sculpture of a gnome. Or the positively venerable Taylor Houghton, whose candy-themed art collection is sufficiently extensive that the 14 year old fields calls from dealers offering tips when new pieces become available.

The article's author, Kelly Crow, calls the phenomenon "a collision of the art boom, the wealth boom and the Baby Einstein approach to parenting," which I suppose is accurate on some level, but to me it just seems kind of weird.

HAS HE MELLOWED? Roger Ebert's reviews today include six four-star reviews, including three major releases (The Julie Taymor/Beatles Across the Universe, Paul Haggis/Tommy Lee Jones' In the Valley of Elah and David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises), plus three-and-a-half stars for Jodie Foster's The Brave One, her revenge flick directed by Neil Jordan (The Crying Game, The Butcher Boy) and co-starring Terrence Howard and ALOTT5MA fave Naveen Andrews.

Back in college debate, we used the expression "point fairy" to describe those judges who magically sprinkled extra points on the debaters in a round, but I've never taken Ebert to be overly generous with his ratings. (That said, our friend Carrie only dropped two stars on Jodie Foster, and three on Mr. Cronenberg.)

The fall movie season has begun. What's your choice this weekend?

BETTER THAN TKTS: A few theatre ticket things for those on a budget. Roundabout Theatre is offering $20 tickets (through Hiptix!) for its shows, which currently include Pygmalion (starring Claire Danes, Jefferson Mays, and Boyd Gaines) and The Ritz (with Kevin Chamberlin and Rosie Perez). Similarly, the Kline/Garner Cyrano De Bergerac is offering $20 last row tickets through Ticketmaster. 3 shows for $60, even if from the very back? That's a pretty sweet deal. Field trip, anyone?

TONY BOURDAIN - CHEF TOPPLER: The man has a gift. I may get all fan-boy if I don't watch myself.

Colicchio gets his serious face on and says "this was the worst dish we've had in three years," but the criticism, though doubtless it is fair and well-observed, is flat and lifeless when placed next to Tony's spicier more creative expressions of culinary dismay. Tom's dig would have sounded better -- more serious, dramatic and more direly condemnatory -- if Bourdain had not just busted out with "not in prison, you couldn't serve that" as the culmination of his own acrimonious tear against the dish in question. In his own words, from this week's blog post:

"Short of biting the heads off kittens while dressed up as a storm trooper, I don't think I could look any less sympathetic."

Far from it, Tony -- Mr. Bourdain... CHEF BOURDAIN! My apologies! -- allow me to do more than sympathize: allow me to pretend I could actually taste the food and so participate vicariously in your charismatically expressed disgust! Yes! YES!! That was the Devil's Own Broccolini! You just kicked my favorite remaining contestant off the show and all I can say is "thank you." Thank you for keeping this artificial process of illusory culinary adventure amusing for me.

It's down to five now, so everybody chime in with who you've got for the finals and the win. I'll take Casey v. Dale with Casey as the winner, based entirely on the "guitar of victory" overdub that she got tonight while presenting her elimination challenge dish. They've been setting us up to like these two for awhile, quietly, and NorthPark Center vs. Halsted Street makes for an amiable contest with tidy cross-appeal for key Bravo target demographics.