The point of an award ceremony is to literally give an award to a selected category of people and celebrate their work. During the National Book Prize, I used to give out a €4000 cheque to every winner and then proceed to spend around another €1,000 marketing the winning book, apart from putting the book into my export list.
Award recipients at the Malta Film Awards attended an over-priced awards ceremony and didn’t receive any monetary rewards at all. The ceremony was a cover for the payment to Tec Malta, a Labour Party-supporting events organiser which usually organises the logistics to the general election. Tec Malta was given the Malta Film Awards to organize it a premium rate so that they can freely service the Labour Party during the general election.
I’m sorry, why on earth did anyone think that these barbarians actually care anything about culture? Carmelo Abela is as dumb as the Butt of Butthead in Beavis and Butthead and Jose Herrera can’t tell his Orson Welles from Ridley Scott, and you thought that these people will genuinely help the film industry?
They are in it for themselves and they use the culture industry for their own personal interests and those of the Party. They are also like opportunistic children – having had vacuous and boring lives, they now get excited like the infants they are for a photo with a foreign star. “Look, ma, I have a photo with David Walliams!”. They are ridiculous, and totally unfit for purpose. They also bring great shame to us and our country. This isn’t how we actually behave. We actually have some gravitas and unlike Carmelo Abela and Jose Herrera, we don’t actually get our pants wet when we meet a foreign actor.
The most important film directors boycotted the ceremony because they knew in advance it was going to be an extravagant show which didn’t respect the industry at all. The award ceremony was attended by three ministers and various government executives. Friends and members of the Labour Party got to announce some winners, like Jason Micallef and Veronique Dalli, Miriam’s sister who is now arguing publicly that we shouldn’t add the term femicide in our criminal code.
I don’t know why anyone would expect a heavily-funded awards ceremony without awards to be anything other than a scam.
Why should you attempt to belittle the Minister of Culture Jose Herrera. It was not Herrera who organized this activity although he had an obligation as Minister of Culture to hand the awards.
I have met Jose Herrera on several occasions and I can assure you that he is very well versed in literature and the history of our Nation. Just to let you know, he certainly read Orson Welles and is an avid cinema goer and absolutely knows the movies by the genius that is Ridley Scott such as his masterpiece Bladerunner which is based on the book written by Philip K Dick. You should read it sometime, its called ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep’ and explores important themes such as empathy and other traits which distinguishes us humans from the rest of the animal kind and possibly AI. I encourage you to read it. I also encourage you to start being more realistic and faithful to the facts and the truth in your writings. One should not write to insult and offend others, but to discuss ideas and whenever needed call a spade a spade.
I will not argue the main topic of your contribution which, in this case, is the Award Ceremony, I tend to partially agree with you especially if the moneys spent on this event runs into six figures, but I honestly feel that your bashing of Minister Herrera is unfair and unjustified.
I hope that you publish my fair comment and thank you for the opportunity.
Read Orson Welles? Orson Welles made films. You’re confusing him with H G Wells.
You seem to be either dyslexic (nothing wrong with that) or having a hard time with English.
Citizen Jake ? The book and screenplay were written by Welles
Dear Mark,
Since I cannot reply to your post below, I am taking the liberty of responding to you here.
No. I do not have a reading disability. I understand the adjectives you used and attributed to other human beings.
I refuse to go down this road, and I refuse to attribute an illness to anyone just because I disagree with him.
I hope you place this gentle reply on your website
@Peter Vassallo, I think you mean Citizen KANE (not Jake), which was directed by, and starred Orson Welles, but he didn’t write the book.
Herrera deserves every form of bashing. Just because he read a couple more books than his colleagues (which isn’t saying much) he is still a good-for-nothing political animal. He has installed cronies of his in all public cultural organisations as soon as he was given the portfolio while being surrounded by thugs whose only interests are contingent upon the interests of some tacky “event organisers” with shady connections. As for the cronies, they are either paid to bully people or to do nothing or both. So the hell with Herrera.