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Awards Blogs Cracking Under the Pressure of Crappy Movie Season

Gold Derby’s Tom O’Neil.Photo: Getty Images, Gold Derby, Awards Daily


August can be a trying time for entertainment bloggers; as all cultural news slows to a crawl and we get loopy from the heat, there’s really no telling what we might resort to (last year, Vulture flirted briefly with becoming a Zac Efron fan site and, had it not been for Superbad, we’d probably have just started posting pictures of our cats). Still, nobody feels the boring pressure of summer’s end quite like awards blogs like Gold Derby and Awards Daily (two of our favorites) — with the Oscars a full seven months away, and practically no statue-worthy movies in sight, their jobs certainly can’t be easy. And although it’s a little disappointing, we can’t say we’re totally surprised that tensions are flaring between the two typically respectful competitors.

It began on Friday when Ryan Adams, a writer for Awards Daily (probably not the Ryan Adams, though we guess anything’s possible), made an unprovoked attack on Gold Derby’s Tom O’Neil over a post on Frozen River’s Melissa Leo (O’Neil thinks she has a shot at a nomination for Best Actress, but based on an interview Leo gave to the Huffington Post, he’s concerned she may be a fit-throwing “diva” with a “smug attitude”). “Not trusting us interpret events on our own,” writes Adams, “Tom feels the need to stomp his feet in two different posts and translate the ‘incident’ so we can see what it looks like though his jaundiced ‘insider’ eyes.” On Saturday, in an epically long rebuttal, O’Neil fired back: “Normally, when two sides disagree over something, they focus on the details of the issue, to sort them out. Not Ryan Adams,” he says. “Nowhere in his hysterical attack on me does he address the specifics of how he and I disagree on the topic of Melissa Leo’s diva tantrum.”

But it doesn’t end there! Taking Adams’s rant as an assault on his credentials, O’Neil posts photos of books he’s written, along with ones of his awards collection (“the largest outside of Jack Nicholson’s house”), and continues:

“Because you brought the subject up, Ryan, let’s compare AwardsDaily.com and TheEnvelope.com in terms of covering showbiz awards over the last few months, OK?

TheEnvelope.com has more detailed Emmy info than any media source on the planet. We broke the Katherine Heigl story over the last few weeks. Also, I leaked the Top 10 semifinalist lists before nominations came out. (For a third year in a row I’ve done that, by the way.) We also were the first media source to reveal what episodes are being viewed by Emmy judges — that’s the most important Emmy information of all because that’s how winners are chosen.

What Emmy scoops did AwardsDaily.com break, Ryan?”

What have YOU done, Ryan? What’s your expertise? Since AwardsDaily.com is the real thing and Gold Derby/TheEnvelope.com is mere gossip, let me know how you surpassed our coverage in any single way over the last few months. Name just one. I’m dying to know.

Yikes! Come on, guys — we know things look pretty dire now (especially coming off a weekend in which the two major releases were Swing Vote and The Mummy 3), but we swear, it’ll be December before you know it!

AwardsDaily.com makes an assassination attempt on Gold Derby! Is this WAR? [Gold Derby/ LAT]
Gold Derby meets Roller Derby [Awards Daily]
Earlier: The August Movie: A Theory of Awfulness

Awards Blogs Cracking Under the Pressure of Crappy Movie Season