Ah, it’s the first quarter of 2008. It’s time to step outside and draw in that distinctive scent wafting through the air. It’s not the coming of Spring you detect, but something a bit more foul. Inhale carefully and you will notice the noxious odor of anal lubricant with a hint of brimstone. That’s right …it’s awards season… that time to rattle off the best in entertainment for 2007.

 

Luckily our writers are not member of any guilds (unless you count the Hermetic Order of the Malcontent Discordians, Local 23), so the writers’ strike has not inhibited us from putting on what passes as an award show around here (however, we would like to express our complete support for the strike, and as a token of our solidarity we have stopped shaving our balls).    

 

So, as a publication which covers music and cinema, it is our obligation to provide our readers with our own assessment of what we think you should be listing to and watching.

 

We here at InsubordiNation typically like to present our opinions with the utmost sincerity and with a certain air of …how should we say… conviction. Last year we claimed not to hold opinions, but rather, “dogmatic, beautiful pearls of unchallengeable wisdom and immutable truth.” It was a thinly veiled attempt at satire, but frankly, we’ve grown a bit bored with that whole shtick. It’s not that we no longer take our opinions seriously (trust us, we do), it’s that we think it is our duty to call “shenanigans” on this industry-shilling award peddling bullshit.

 

Seriously, is there anything more vapid, inane and utterly horrid than the back-slapping pageantry of award shows? The Emmys, the Oscars and –gasp– the Grammys have become the most absurd, irrelevant, overindulgent, self-aggrandizing spectacles this side of a Kim Jong-Il coronation ceremony. They’re entertaining only in an ironic sense, for the same reason you watch Cops or Cheaters, as a rubber-necking, guilty pleasure.    

  

But even for the magazines, websites and indie-blogs counting down the best albums and movies of the preceding year, is there really any point to any of it? Sure, some works of art are certainly better than others and we here at InsubordiNation are just as qualified as anyone else to determine what the best are, but once you get past the top five or so, it really just becomes a crapshoot guessing game.

 

Honestly, is there any objective way to ascertain whether our pick for the 16th best album of the year is really just a hair better than our pick for 17th best? Is there any metric used to obtain these figures at all? Sadly, the answer is an obvious “hell no.”

 

We just start plugging shit in that sounds good. It’s entirely subjective, completely unscientific, and in the end, total bullshit. You know it and we know it. We just want you to know that we know it.   

 

However, given that caveat, we here at InsubordiNation still run the best award show in town. So, feel free to peruse this special feature and enjoy… just don’t take anything we write all that seriously.