Awards-night jitters

( First of two parts )

It’s the awards season again – that time of the year when we honor outstanding achievements in film. Staging an awards night, however, has become quite complicated and producers and organizers always have to go through a thousand and one headaches putting up a presentation over and done with in just one night. Aside from raising funds (the most difficult part) and cooking up production numbers, there are also other kinks that need to be ironed out. Below are just some of the problems encountered every year (there seems to be no solutions to these) by members of the various award-giving bodies and their respective television producers every time they put up an awards presentation:

Nobody comes on time. Well, maybe just Perla Bautista and the late Charito Solis before. At least, Ms. Solis would let steam off by throwing a tantrum – and justifiably so because she’d take the trouble to get there on time and the affair wouldn’t start until two hours later. Perla Bautista would patiently wait it out and still give out the sweetest of smiles every time you ask her how she’s doing – and you end up really feeling guilty for making her wait for what seems like eternity.

The trouble is, you cannot open an awards presentation with just Perla Bautista and Charito Solis there. Sure, you can tap them as presenters for the first set of awards, but what about the next one? (Also, you can’t put them in the minor categories in the beginning of he show because they are considered pillars of the film industry.) You certainly can’t proceed to the next set of awards because there would be no other stars around to serve as presentors because they are the only ones there – at that time. Why, even the winners aren’t there yet!

To this day, I still get annoyed just remembering an incident that happened in the Gawad Urian over 10 years ago. The invitation clearly stated that the affair was starting at 5:30 p.m. Since nobody was there at 5:30, except, you guessed it – Perla Bautista and Charito Solis (plus Mona Lisa and Rosa Rosal) – we couldn’t begin with the proceedings until a little before 7 p.m. In spite of the delay, when the first two sets of awards were handed out, it proved quite embarrassing on the part of the organizers because the winners in those two categories weren’t there and neither had they bothered to send representatives. Oh, one of them did – except that this representative came in three hours late – way, way after the category was handed out.

When this representative, in fact, presented himself to me, I wanted to stab him with the Urian trophy (it’s a very sharp object). In my mind, I wanted to blurt out to him, "Representative ka na nga lang, three hours late ka pa!"

In the beginning, the organizers of the award-giving bodies thought they found the solution to this tardiness problem by printing 6 p.m. on the invitation card even if the affair won’t really start until 8. The problem is, only Perla Bautista is professional enough to follow this. With the rest of her colleagues – especially the younger ones – you may very well put 1 p.m. on the invitation card and they’ll still show up at 9, 10 or sometimes 11 p.m.

Through the years in the Gaward Urian, we’ve discovered that the only way to solve this problem is to tap starlets as presenters in the first set of awards. Since they have no "airs" yet, you can tell them and their managers to be there on time or else they won’t be tapped as presenters anymore and they’ll lose that chance at getting an exposure.

Presenters pile up at the latter part of the show and you don’t know where to use them.

Yes, this is still related to the problem of tardiness among stars. While you have this problem of not having any star to use as presenter in the beginning of the show, you find yourself saddled with so many stars in the latter part, but with so few categories to put them in. Unfortunately, you just can’t send them home because you’ll be bruising a lot of egos and, yes, sayang din. Some of these stars are really big names and they add a lot of glamour and even prestige to an awards show. If only they could be trained to come in early, there should be less problems in this world especially during awards presentations.

Presenters choosing the categories they will be presenting.

Some big name stars now insist on presenting an award solo. This sometimes becomes a problem because there are only very few categories and this leaves the other stars with nothing else to do. The bigger problem, however, is when everyone insists on presenting the Best Actress category (the most awaited portion of an awards night) and you don’t know who to give it to because everyone’s asking for it.

In the Academy Awards in Hollywood, they solve this by asking the previous year’s winner in the Best Actor category to present the Best Actress award (the previous year’s Best Actress may be in the running again so she is made presenter in the Best Actor category). Somehow this doesn’t work in local setting. Most of the stars insist on presenting Best Actress – or else they just won’t accept the invitation to act as presenter and you end up with one less important star in your guest list. (To be concluded)