Last week I wrote a little bit on the AVN Awards nomination process. In that article, I attempted to deconstruct parts of the process, albeit from my personal perspective.

In an email I received this morning from AVN's long-time editor, reporter, and intrepid legal expert, Mark Kernes, a few of the points I made were either clarified or contradicted. And so, in the interest of fair play and equal time, here is Mark's version which clarifies my version which hoped to clarify your version of how this thing works.

Mark writes: You (jimmyD) wrote: "Porn Company Owner: You¹re right. We¹ll submit it for Best Solo Performance. You see how this shit works?"

(Mark says) Interestingly, it actually does work that way, and there's a reason for it: Fish just LOVES to find the ONE scene or performance in a BAD feature that's actually nomination-worthy. Frankly, I don't know how the guy finds time to watch as much shit as he does -- and I can say that because *I* don't have time to watch as much shit as I ought to -- but left-field nominations are what make the AVN awards interesting.

(JimmyD wrote) "And you know how in the AVN reviews they sometimes say something like, 'pre-nom for?' this or that? Well, while those words often don¹t 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-nom¹d it for, it¹s worthy of nominations in just about every category that exists."

(Mark says) Well, speaking as someone who has often written "pre-nom for...", I must tell you that those words DO mean something, because at around this time of year, we go through all our reviews, and every time those words appear, that tape or scene or performer gets put on the pre-nom list in whatever category follows those words. Yes, the company head who's read those words in the review may think their entire tape is golden, but our reviewers don't bullshit about what we think is "pre-nom-able". Where the real fun comes in is when all of us get together and try to figure out which of the dozen or so pre-noms (or in the case of best anal scene, it's more like 70-80 pre-nom'd scenes) is actually worthy of nomination. Fortunately, whoever pre-nom'd a particular scene earlier in the year may have seen something better later, so that helps weed out some -- but that's only part of why the nomination process takes so long; the other is hauling tapes out of the warehouse so everybody can watch scenes that some reviewer stakes his/her reputation on being nominatable. It's a bitch, but somebody's got to do it. --Kernes"

jimmyD sez: Thanks, Mark, for clarifying these important issues. Many producers of truly dismal and pathetic, incompetently produced, piece-of-shit titles will be greatly relieved to know that no matter how bad, how awful, how wretched the fruits of their work are, there's still hope for an AVN Award nomination. I would be remiss, however, if I did not mention that I have had personal experience (with a few of my own titles) that did receive the much-touted "pre-nom for" words in the review, yet never saw the light of an actual nomination. In fact, it seems to me that each time a reveiw of one of my flicks received a "pre-nom for," it never recieved an actual nomination. But I guess shit often falls thru the cracks, or I smoke too much pot and don't remember shit accurately, or both.




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