The Black Like Who? Me? Award for transgender, transracial transformation goes to Leon Schuster, for acting as a white man who has to drag up as a black woman to escape his/her pursuers. ‘It’s a kids’ movie,” protested Leon when accused of toilet humour. The box-office lit up.
The Inaugural Ronnie Roberts Award for Betrayal goes to those who tried to rip off our former president, Nelson Mandela, by making copies of his ‘art works” and getting them signed by machine — or whatever they did. (Oprah is very upset. She bought the full set.) Runner-up: Ronald Suresh Roberts for his authorised/de-authorised biography of Nadine Gordimer, No Cold Kitchen.
The Vusi Mona Award for Confusing Fact and Fiction goes to Zulu Love Letter, the film in which the name of the Mail & Guardian was used as the paper for which the protagonist, played by Pamela Nomvete, works. Yes, they shot it in our offices, and no, they didn’t take down the signs indicating where they were. But what was all that fictional stuff about an editor selling out a photographer to the cops? And, anyway, we haven’t had a white editor for some time.
The Posthumous Brenda Fassie Award for Late Career Change goes to Rian Malan, who abandoned his on-off job as a writer to become a singer-songwriter, delivering a wry album in Afrikaans. It was called Alien/Inboorling and featured a track in which he apparently says he talks to his dog. Pretoria News critic Diane de Beer wrote: ‘The album requires some concentration.”
The loveLife Ripped Condom Award goes to Paul Grootboom for his play Relativity, set in Soweto, which featured a father sodomising his son, a serial rapist strangling victims with their G-strings, a hijacker who beats up his girlfriend’s father and a policeman burning a suspect’s testicles with a lighter. Playwright Grootboom told the M&G: ‘The white audiences are shocked by the violence, but the black audiences are shocked about the vulgar language.”
The Performing Seal Award for Best Circus Act goes to Missy Elliott, who fell and injured her foot shortly before her appearance at the no-show Kora Awards in December. She had to give her concert perched on a motorised tricycle. Beninese organiser Ernest Adjove apparently was nowhere to be seen at the R45-million bash. One newspaper reported a Durban audience member warning Adjove, ‘Don’t fuck with the Zulus.”
The Hamlet Award for Thoughtful Inaction goes to Minister of Arts and Culture Pallo Jordan, who said a lot of nice things but failed to motivate his employees in the Department of Arts and Culture. He’s got some way to go before he can say he’s sorted out the mess at the National Arts Council, for example. Still, nobody can say Jordan doesn’t write an eloquent obituary.
The Pope John Paul II Award for Rampant Homophobia goes to reggae dancehall stars Vybes Kartel, Buju Banton, Elephant Man, Sizzla, Bounty Killer, Beenie Man, TOK and Capleton. At the end of 2004, gay activists protested the inclusion of Vybes Kartel in the prestigious Music of Black Origin awards. In February this year, a truce was struck between activists and musicians in what was referred to by a music producer as a war ‘about the limits of free speech versus the responsibilities of artists”. Beenie Man was slated for singing: ‘Hang chi chi gal wid long piece of rope”, in translation: ‘hang the lesbians”.
The Rude Paparazzi Award goes to the Sunday Times, which sent a camera crew to the M&G‘s 20th-anniversary bash — to record comments from the great and the good about … the Sunday Times, ahead of its own anniversary bash next year. Still, Sunday Times social columnist and recent blonde Gwen Gill came to our party instead of the opening of the Michaelangelo Towers in Sandton, on the same night, so that’s something.
The Hustler/Loslyf Award for Limp Pornography goes to the play Ladies’ Night, in which a bunch of young men didn’t do the Full Monty, and didn’t entertain in any other way either. Runner-up: No, it’s not the exhibition of altered casts of Michelangelo’s David shown at the new Sandton hotspot now regarded as Africa’s most expensive piece of real estate. It was the porn movie South African Stories shot in the capital city with German porn star Nina in the early Nineties and now given out free, at Adultworlds, with every Hustler magazine. On a hill overlooking Pretoria, amid the aloes, two youths battle to maintain their erections for a bored-looking waif who eventually gets it off with a white woman and two black men, in a river at a game farm. Yes, these things happen, we’re afraid to say.
The Wobbly Camera Award for Shoestring Budget Filmmaking goes to Darryl Roodt for his movie Faith’s Corner, shot in 10 days, on a budget of less than R1-million, on superannuated film stock and with a hand-cranked camera and no sound. That’s less than a 10th of the budget of his previous movie, Yesterday, which has yet to recoup its budget. Faith’s Corner has yet to recoup its budget too.