It’s that time of year again when everyone convinces themselves their shit is really, really good. That’s right; it’s AVN Award nomination time.

So for those of you who don't know how this works, let me deconstruct the nomination process a bit-- In a porn-nutshell, here's how it works: Anything and everything any company’s produced and distributed in the past year (i.e., since last year’s cut-off date which I think was at the end of September, 2002) is eligible for submission. Notice I didn’t say “anything good” they’ve produced,” I simply said “anything” they’ve produced which means anything they convince themselves is good which means just about everything they’ve produced.

So you see, this is how it gets tough for the people at AVN who have to sort through all the shit: Lots of companies convince themselves (or become convinced by their directors) that just about everything the company’s put out in the past year is good enough for an AVN Award nomination. That’s right; everything and anything! And why’s that? Well, other than inflated egos and illogical rationalizations, there's so many fucking award categories. You see, with so many award categories it becomes easy to find at least one, or more, categories worthy of submitting any and every piece of shit any company's produced and distributed over the past year.

Porn Director: “I know the movie completely sucked and was mostly shot out of focus with no lighting cuz, you know, my camerman didn't show and I had to use the gardener who was cutting the lawn at the location house to shoot the camera. And I know we didn’t actually do any editing and just strung the camera footage together by crash cutting between two old VHS machines. And yeah, the colors were way off and everyone in it had green skin and half the audio was missing from the whole movie plus only two of the scenes were new scenes because all the others were scenes we already put in other movies. But we only spent about $1200 on the whole movie so it was pretty good considering that, right? Anyway, remember the first part of scene three which was one of the new scenes and had that eighteen-year-old girl who was still in high school who drug over-dosed the next day when she ran away with her Mother's third husband who was filling in for her boyfriend who got arrested and so her step-father was her suitcase pimp that day? Well, that scene has her doing herself with a really big, Black Power, fist-shaped dildo and it was so fucking hot that she really came for real!”

Porn Company Owner: “You’re right. We’ll submit it for Best Solo Performance.”

You see how this shit works?

And you know how in the AVN reviews they sometimes say something like, “pre-nom for…” this or that? Well, while those words often don’t mean jack-shit, they do serve to further convince all these companies that the particular movie whose review included those words is a world-class, epic, masterpiece of adult erotica which means not only is the movie worthy of a nomination for whatever the reviewer pre-nom’d it for, it’s worthy of nominations in just about every category that exists.

Personally, I don’t envy the AVN people who have to deal with this shit. But, of course, I do envy all the money Paul Fishbein makes off this whole process. But that’s another story.




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